Listen to this episode and read more about it at theallusionist.org/fiona1.
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, stick a fork in language, it's done.
This episode is the first of a two-parter about the name Fiona - get ready, there’s a lot to say about the name Fiona! It all came about because of Harry Josephine Giles got in touch. You heard them on the show before, talking about expanding the queer lexicon in Scots language in the Many Ways At Once episode. After the episode earlier this year about the name Tiffany being old, a surprise to most people, Josie got in touch and said, “Do you know about Fiona?” and I did not! And now I do! And it is full of intrigue and fascination and beauty and complication. Remember this is just the first part, there are more Fiona facts to come: in the second part, we’ll talk more about the etymology of Fiona and early appearances in literature, and other corresponding names in various languages; but this part is about the first known Fiona.
By the way! The Allusionist live show Your Name Here is coming to Toronto - 1pm 11 December 2022 at the HotDocs cinema, tickets are on sale now, every attendee gets a special pencil, and if you’re an Allusionist patron you get some extra perks too. Mask up and come along! Links to tickets are at theallusionist.org/events.
On with the show.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: Fiona is a name I think now that still has a slightly romantic, slightly historical Scottish feel. I think everyone thinks it's an old Scottish name, but it's not an old Scottish name!
I'm Harry Josephine Giles, or Josie for short. I am a writer and performer from Orkney in Scotland, from the Northern Isles. My most recent book is a verse novel in Orkney Scots called Deep Wheel Orcadia. It's a science fiction verse novel, and it's just won the Arthur C Clark Award.
HZ: Welcome back to the show. Why did you want to return?
HARRY JOSIE GILES: Well, I want to talk to you about the origins, the very surprising origins of the first name Fiona, which, when I started coming across this story, I couldn't quite believe it, but I've dug and dug and done more and more research and I'm pretty sure it's quite true. And I think a lot of people assume that it's a really old Gaelic name from the Highlands of Scotland. And it kind of is - but it also really isn't.
HZ: “Kind of is, but isn't”? Intriguing! How does that work?
HARRY JOSIE GILES: Well, the first public figure - I'm confident saying this - the first public figure who had the name Fiona is the Scottish writer Fiona Macleod. So Fiona Macleod was writing at the very end of the 19th century/beginning of the 20th century, writing for about 12 years.
Now the caveat here is if you go into Scottish Census records, you will find a dozen Fionas who appear before Fiona Macleod. And that's in the Digital Census records, but I've gone to the original handwritten version of that dozen Fionas, and what you find is that certainly in most of the cases, if not all the cases, something that is not Fiona has been mistranscribed as Fiona. In a couple of them, there's just a sort of ink blot and you can't really tell what the name is.
HZ: Sorry, your middle name's Blot now.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: Right? And a couple of them, it's definitely Flora, which is an old Scottish name, that is a very common old Scottish name. In a couple of them, it might be Iona, or it might be Laura, or Lorna….
HZ: And there's one Aarghh and a Licken, I think? None of these handwritten name look like Fiona to me.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: But if it is Fiona, there's no record of that Fiona in the birth records. So it's all a bit of a mystery. But I think what's happening is that because people now think that Fiona is a very old Scottish name, when they come across an ambiguous entry in the census, when they're digitizing that, whether it's a computer trying to work out the name, or a human trying to work out the name, they superimpose the word 'Fiona', which they assume is old, onto the older record.
HZ: How far back do the Scottish census or birth records go?
HARRY JOSIE GILES: We are only going back into the 19th century, so into the early or mid 19th century. I'm trying to be as circumspect as I can be about this - I could be wrong about any of this. And if you go to ancestry.com, you will certainly find loads of Fionas from around the world, whether it's a name of a different derivation - but I've been to a few of them (I haven't systematically gone through them) and often you find exactly the same mistranslation thing happening.
HZ: Please inform us if you do have any slamdunk evidence of Fionas from before the late 19th century.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: There is also one boat called Fiona, which, if you're into historical racing boats, was actually quite a famous boat, which was made in the mid 19th century before Fiona Macleod was writing. And that was a sort of made up sequence of sounds, and in this case it was a derivation of the original boat's builder, the first person who was having the boat built had a name that then got slightly changed to be Fiona. Its original builder was H. Lafone of Liverpool, l-a-f-o-n-e, who, had a trading ship called Lafonia, and then had a boat built called Fiona. I don't know why he switched the vowels, but apparently the vowels got switched.
HZ: Just innovating.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: Then the boat was taken over by a Mr. Emmanuel Boucher and this is the kicker: the boat was so successful that Boucher had several other Fionas built after it, and also gave the name to his daughter as a middle name, as a middle name. So, before Fiona Macleod, there is an Emily Honora Fiona Boucher. I might be wrong that he named the daughter after the boat, but the boat did come before the daughter. So it does seem like he really liked the name.
HZ: Certainly seems like he really liked that boat. Emily Honora Fiona Boucher's baptism was registered in 1868, nearly three decades before the first person to have the first name Fiona - definitely Fiona and not a mistranscription - Fiona Macleod.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: I'm Moll Heaton-Callaway and I'm a scholar of book history and gender identity, queer book history, essentially. So I work in the ways that queer people have made books, made texts.
HZ: Moll's studies have concentrated on the writers Fiona Macleod and William Sharp. When Fiona Macleod's novels became popular in the 1890s, so did the name Fiona.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: Given how common the name Fiona is now, you wouldn't have thought it just suddenly appeared in like 1893 or whatever. And it's this massive boom of this name, it starts from nothing and through the 1890s and the 1900s, you can count in a census how many people have this name.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: According to Scotland's People, which gathers the birth records and makes them available, there are no registered Fionas born before Fiona Macleod. In total, there are four Fionas born after Fiona Macleod and before 1900. Then in the next decade, the first decade of the 20th century, there are 19 Fionas in Scotland. And then in the second decade there are 24, and then in the third decade there are 115. And then in the fourth decade there are 643. And after that I stopped counting. So that name just starts exploding in popularity.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: Which might be one reason why it seems so old, is because it became so ubiquitous so quickly that it doesn't seem even likely that it just started in the middle of nowhere in 1890.
HZ: But it did.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: And I think it was because Fiona Macleod was so popular.
HZ: Naming trends often reflect the popularity of artists or their fictional characters - like how there were no baby Meridas registered in Britain until after Disney’s 2012 film Brave starring Princess Merida, or the name Wendy becoming popular after JM Barrie invented the name for the character in Peter Pan. But who was Fiona Macleod, the author that launched a thousand Fionas, and then more Fionas?
HARRY JOSIE GILES: She was hugely popular in her own time. She published multiple novels, books of poetry, a couple of plays; a huge amount of work in about 12 years. The Aberdeen Free Press at the time, in a review said of Fiona Macleod that "We know of no other author since Sir Walter Scott that has been so eminently successful as Miss Fiona Macleod."
HZ: Wow.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: Her first novel was called Pharais, which is a form of the Gaelic word for paradise. It was published in 1894 and was subtitled 'A Romance of the Isles', which gives you a kind of impression of it. She was writing into what's called the Celtic Revival, which was this period across the Celtic countries of trying to revive a language that many people saw was fading, and to revive a culture that many people thought was fading. The Celtic revival in Ireland is probably the best known, and it was a bit less developed in Scotland. But Fiona Macleod from this first novel was talked about as this prophetess of the Celtic revival.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: Macleod produces all of these books about Scottish life and Scottish heritage in a sort of Thomas Hardy is quite a close analog. So it's that kind of quite miserable tales of Scottish peasantry.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: She was a huge popular and critical success. She was also criticized for people who thought that this kind of Celtic romanticism was backward-looking or overly emotional. But for people who were kind of interested in the Celtic revival, she was a beacon of hope, really, for a Scottish Celtic revival. And she herself was a Gaelic speaker. She was from the island of Iona, which is a small island in the west of Scotland. And she came, so she said, from an old Gaelic tradition and a tradition of Gaelic storytelling and myth making. And a lot of her work was a way of kind of retelling a bunch of ideas about Gaelic life. So she kept writing for about 12 years and there was a lot of speculation about who exactly she was and what, what the details of her life were because she never appeared in public.
HZ: Sort of like an Elena Ferrante type.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: Very much like that, very much like Ferrante; and people were, like Ferrante, constantly speculating about who she might have been. So there was a lot of speculation, a lot of uncertainty, a lot of rumours in the press. Her intermediary often was her cousin, who was a writer called William Sharp, a Scottish writer who was also publishing at the time, and was well known as an editor and reviewer and a minor novelist in his own right.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: William Sharp was a late Victorian writer who was not really the most popular writer in the world, was what you might call a hack writer, so wrote a lot of potboilers, a lot of quite cheap novels - and by cheap, I mean kind of sensationalist, inexpensive stories, like were published in boys magazines, that kind of story. But also published quite cheap biographies, and anthologies of poetry, and just sort of eked out a career in London that was not particularly fantastic career economically speaking.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: And William Sharp was often involved in getting book deals for Fiona Macleod.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: And Fiona got a lot more popular than Sharp had ever been, had a lot more weight as an artist than Sharp ever did. And then suddenly Macleod stops publishing in 1905.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: And then at the end of 1905, a bunch of friends of Fiona Macleod get this letter from Elizabeth Sharp, who was William Sharp's wife. And William Sharp had just died at the end of 1905, quite young, he was only 50 when he died, but he'd been quite ill for a lot of his life. And their mutual friends received this letter, posted by Elizabeth Sharp. And it reads: "This will reach you after my death. You will think I've wholly deceived you about Fiona Macleod, but in an intimate sense, this is not so, though, and inevitably in certain details, I have misled you. Only it is a mystery I cannot explain. Perhaps you will intuitively understand or may come to understand. The rest is silence. Farewell, William Sharp." And then as a post script - because this letter is so typical of William Sharp, he often wrote in this very flowery, very elusive way, and I think he wrote this letter and then realized he hadn't been entirely clear.
HZ: Clear as an egg.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: So clear! And he adds this post script, which, "It is only right, however, to add that I, and only I was the author in the literal and literary sense of all written under the name of Fiona Macleod."
HZ: Ah!!!
HARRY JOSIE GILES: Gasp! Shock Reveal!
HZ: Big third act twist.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: It is a huge twist.
This news, it really took the literary world by storm. It was republished across the literary press. There were defenses of William Sharp and Fiona Macleod; there were more defenses than criticism. There was a little bit of criticism and a little bit of a certain kind of prudish wondering about what William Sharp was up to taking on this Gaelic Catholic female persona. And William Sharp was was a Lowlander and a Protestant and ostensibly a man, and people didn't really understand what was going on with that. And that kind of debate raged for years after the death of William Sharp, people trying to make sense of what was going on.
HZ: Yeah, because you hear a lot of 19th Century female authors taking on male pseudonyms.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: That was quite common, but the reverse was a lot less common.
HZ: Yes, because no one would publish you.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: Right?
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: There is one that I know: Grant Allen published one book under a female name, was already a writer at the time, continued to write under his own name, but released one book as a woman as part of this sort of literary navigation of the concept of the new woman. But that's the only one that I know of from the time who had a female pseudonym. They're not very common at all.
HZ: And it's interesting that in a not particularly hospitable time for female authors, Fiona does so much better than William.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: A lot of people have said that Fiona Macleod was a marketing ploy because Fiona's work was so much more popular and so much more artistically interesting than Sharp's. I would question the degree to which people say, "Oh, this is a marketing ploy," because there are so few women writing in the Celtic Renaissance, which is usually associated with figures like Yeats, for example, WB Yeats.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: A lot of people thought that she was potentially actually a pseudonym of William Butler Yeats, who was a major figure in the Irish Celtic revival and was in correspondence with Fiona Macleod a lot. And they were often spoken about in the same breath, kind of Yeats as the Irish side, and Fiona Macleod as the Scottish side.
HZ: Fiona was a lot more professionally successful, and, it sounds, personally popular than William - did he mind? I'd be really upset!
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: I think there is a certain degree to which he didn't really mind. Primarily because a lot of the work that William Sharp was doing, he was really unhappy with. So you see quite a lot of him saying, I want to write something better and more interesting and more cutting edge. But he can't, because he has to make money. He's not like somebody like, I don't know, Swinburne who has enough monetary backing to do whatever he wants. Sharp is having to support himself on his writing, he doesn't have any other money to fall back on. So he writes these potboilers and these not very good pieces of work because he has to get them out very quickly, because otherwise he's not going to eat. And that's for quite a large period of Sharp's life. So I think the Fiona Macleod name allowed Sharp to make these artistic choices. He'd made some money by this point, and now he has the flexibility to say, okay, I'm gonna write these artistically more viable works. But he doesn't want them to be tarnished with his own bad reputation as a hack writer. So that is one theory why it's published directly under Fiona Macleod, is that it's an attempt to get away from his own reputation. So I don't think that there's necessarily the dynamic of Sharp wishing he'd had that career under his own name, because there is a degree to which the Fiona Macleod name is more reflective of the kind of person and the kind of work that William wanted to write, wanted to create.
About the being more personally liked: William Sharp is very much one of those people who doesn't really seem to notice when he's disliked. There's quite a lot of quite interesting letters where he's just being extremely friendly and extremely open with people and extremely vivacious with people, and them just not reacting with the same energy, and him just going on regardless. But then Fiona, in her letters, doesn't show the same kind of friendliness. It is kind of like Fiona is a relief from having to try to be liked all time.
HZ: So interesting, isn’t it, because usually women have been socialized to be likable, and more ingratiating.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: Absolutely. And there is a degree to which in some letters Fiona can be like that, but in a completely different way from Sharp; hers is much more businesslike. Whereas William is always being like, “Please like me. Please tell me I'm good enough.”
HZ: People can smell the need.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: Yeah. Whereas Fiona is much more self confident. And I think that's one of the most interesting parts about when you read the letters next to each other, they do read like different people. Fiona does read like a much more comfortable person in herself and a much more confident person in herself, and a lot more attuned to other people rather than just sort of railroading through with this attempt to be liked. It might also be knowing, for example, that female writers are treated much less seriously. So it's perhaps a sense that she has to force people to take her seriously by being a very business-minded, practical person and not have these bubbly approaches to people for fear that they might - to use a modern word - consider her to be a bit of an airhead, because bless bless him, William Sharp does sometimes come across as a bit of an airhead.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: And Fiona Macleod also carried on correspondence with other people, particularly women and particularly women writers, and did develop literary friendships and associations. William Butler Yeats tells a story of essentially of meeting Fiona; he said that he would sit with William Sharp and a ‘Fiona mood’ would come upon William and then Yeats would speak with Fiona Macleod. And then when the Fiona mood left, William Sharp would come back and would have no memory of what went before. Elizabeth Sharp disputes that and says no, he never didn't remember, but there were certainly these moods of Fiona that came upon upon him.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: Fiona does have a lot of friendships with a lot of people, primarily women, and is an entire person, or is presented as an entire person in her own right. This is one of those places where we have to think: if this was just a marketing ploy or if this was just a pseudonym for Sharp, why go to all of the trouble of forming these social relationships as Fiona, sending all of these letters as Fiona, in Fiona's handwriting - which was generally the handwriting of Sharp's sister Mary. William Sharp would write a draft and that would go to Mary. She would hand write it, and that would then be sent to whoever Fiona was corresponding with.
HZ: And I wonder whether - because now you don't see people's handwriting that often, but back then, they were probably a lot more kind of alert to how you would characterize people from their handwriting.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: I think it's partly that; I think they wanted a feminine hand - for want of a better word - or what would be perceived as a feminine hand. I think it was also that Fiona Macleod and William Sharp would write to the same people, and so they needed the handwriting to look different, to preserve the secret.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: And it's just extremely interesting to look at this process of identity creation. Fiona is acting in the world as a woman - and acting in the world very aggressively. She's making her own publishing deals, she's making her own pitches for stories to magazines. She's making connections with people, often people that William Sharp didn't always know, and couldn't necessarily make connections with as William Sharp, but Macleod is making all of these connections as a person in her own right.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: Some people were in on the secret. Usually the people who were closest to William and Elizabeth Sharp. Some people kind of worked it out and found their way into the secret, and some people were let in on it.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: One example is Richard le Gallienne, who read Macleod's first novel and thought to himself, "I know this writer, I know who wrote this." And he commented to a magazine that he thought that it was William Sharp and not Fiona Macleod, as was written on the spine. And William Sharp very hastily telegrammed, and I think his exact words were, "For God's sake, shut your mouth." But everybody else found out after William Sharp's death. He had handwritten note cards to the people he was closest to tell them in person after his death that he wrote as Macleod. Everybody else found out through the newspaper.
HZ: As for William Sharp's wife Elizabeth: what was her relationship to or with Fiona Macleod?
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: As far as we can tell, Elizabeth was extremely supportive. Elizabeth Sharp was William Sharp's cousin, they didn’t know each other as children particularly well, but they had been very close from like their late teens. The impression that you get from Elizabeth Sharp's biography of William Sharp is that Elizabeth is extremely protective of both William and Fiona and is very open to the peculiarities that are going on.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: Elizabeth Sharp, the wife, publishes a memoir of William Sharp and Fiona Macleod, ahuge biography of their, their writing life. And the first half, the first book is entitled William Sharp, and the second book is entitled Fiona Macleod. The whole of it has a frontispiece with a portrait of William Sharp, signed Fiona Macleod. So it's this book in two halves. The biography, it's partially, I think, a sort of rehabilitation. It's in the wake of a literary scandal. It's an attempt to make the story make a bit more sense to the audience, and also I think to dismiss what was some of the more scurrilous ideas that were going around at the time. The biography is filled with William's own descriptions of his life as Fiona and Fiona's own descriptions of how Fiona thought about herself, and also descriptions of how Elizabeth thought of both of them. It's not easy to make sense of in contemporary terms, but the clearest way I can put it is that, as William Sharp and Fiona Macleod thought of it, they saw themselves as two aspects of the same person. They had very different writing careers, and they wrote about quite different things. And they saw themselves as friends and collaborators who sort of happened to inhabit the same body.
There's a number of different ways that we can kind of read that now, and in fact read it at the time: some people wondered if there was some kind of what we would know call transgender impulse going on some sexological peculiarity. And the science of sexology was really emerging at the time. Some people, both now and at the time, read this as what we call now a plural identity or what sometimes gets pathologized as dissociative identity disorder. And that too is an emerging science at the time, and people wrote about William and Fiona as potentially some example of the dual personality. And people also spoke about it as a kind of spiritual possession, that William Sharp was kind of possessed by the spirit of the land, this Gaelic Highland spirit Fiona Macleod, to write these books. That's particularly how William Butler Yeats would often talk about this.
But I think it's worth hearing some of William's own words on this. Here's one letter that William Sharp wrote about Fiona Macleod, he said: "This rapt sense of oneness with nature, this cosmic ecstasy and elation, this wayfaring across the extreme verges of the common world, all this is so wrought up with the romance of life that I could not bring myself to expression by my outer self, insistent and tyrannical as that need is... My truest self, the self who is below all other selves and my most intimate life and joys and sufferings, thoughts, emotions, and dreams, must find expression, yet I cannot, save in this hidden way."
HZ: Wow. It's pretty beautiful stuff. It's like standing in a high wind.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: It is, it is. And that's how they both write a lot of the time, a really romantic view of themselves and of the world. They wrote letters to each other, William and Fiona, on their mutual birthday, they would write letters to each other. And their final letter to each other in, in 1905 - this is William writing to Fiona, which I think again helps to understand how he saw Fiona: "All that is best in this past year is due to you, mo caraid dileas" - 'my loyal friend' that is Gaelic - "and I hope and believe that seeds have been sown, which will be reborn in flower and fruit, and maybe green grass in waste places and may even grow to forests. I have not always your serene faith and austere eyes, dear, but I come to much in and through my weakness as through your strength, but we'll be one and the same au fond even then, shall we not, Fiona dear? Together, we shall be good Sowers, Fionaghal mo rùn, and let us work contentedly at that. I wish you Joy and Sorrow, Peace, and Unrest, and Leisure, Sun, and Wind, and Rain, all Earth and Sea and Sky in this coming year. And inwardly dwell with me so that less and less I may fall short of your need as well as your ideal. And may our "Mystic's Prayer" be true for us both who are one."
HZ: "Peace and unrest."
HARRY JOSIE GILES: Peace and unrest. And that's William writing so romantically. Fiona's reply to William is somewhat harsher and mostly scolds him for being lazy, which is quite an interesting pairing.
HZ: It's just very upsetting when your alter ego is mean to you.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: Absolutely. But I think he used Fiona to push himself along sometimes. So in these letters there's very much this sense of two in one. And at the same time, there's a lot in Williams letters and in Elizabeth Sharp's memoir where he say things like, "Sometimes I imagine that I am half a woman." And in a description of him going about London, Elizabeth Sharp says, "There was scarcely a day that went by where he did not try to imagine himself as a woman."
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: It seems that William Sharp was extremely open with Elizabeth about the presence of Fiona Macleod, and indeed about the presence of a general femininity within himself. And it seems that she was extremely supportive of this side of William's and very supportive of the presence of Fiona and not concerned about it, except when it comes to the fact that the presence of Fiona meant that William was working two people's careers at the same time.
HZ: William had been ill since childhood - a series of illnesses including scarlet fever, rheumatic fever and typhoid left him in fragile health. And then he had the strain of writing enough for two authors.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: But there doesn't seem to have been any particular emotional strain on Elizabeth except this general sense of concern and love for her husband, her wife, however you want to express that. There's only this concern for the physical strain of being in the closet, essentially.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: So this is how Elizabeth explains the two selves: "In surveying the dual life as a whole, I have seen how from the early partially realized twin ship, WS was the first to go adventuring and find himself, while his twin FM remained passive or a separate self. When she awoke to active consciousness, she became the deeper, the more impelling, the more essential factor. By reason of this severance and of the acute conflict that at times resulted therefrom, the flaming of the dual life became so fierce that Wilfion, as I named the inner and third self that lay behind that dual expression, realized the imperativeness of gaining control over his two separated selves and of bringing them into some kind of conscious harmony." So Elizabeth names this third self as a sort of nonbinary Wilfion, a pure artistic personality that fuses masculine and feminine, that fuses Highland and Lowland in a kind of Scottish idea at the time, and an artistic idea at the time, into this one figure Wilfion. And I should say that William or maybe Fiona, or maybe both of them, at least once sign a letter to Elizabeth Sharp, as Wilfion. So that is also a name that they use for themselves.
HZ: With all the provisos that we can't know for certain William's gender identity, and all of that: do you think that Elizabeth's observable attitude towards it all suggests that the late Victorians may have been more thoughtful about gender fluidity than we imagine them in retrospect?
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: I absolutely think that that is the case, certainly within certain groups of people. So the Sharps were very much within, for example, feminist circles. So they were very politically open-minded, shall we say. And I think there is a lot more flexibility within the Victorian conception of gender, especially in the late Victorian period, than we really give it any particular credit for. For example, if we look at a lot of sexological discourse from this period, while it's not fantastic to read as a modern day person, it's also a lot more fluid with regards to gender than we think of it as being.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: But I think Elizabeth and people around William and Fiona supported and agreed with this idea. And there were a lot of ideas at that time in art and culture of androgyny, of a union of masculine and feminine of trying to overcome that binary being an artistic ideal, that that's an idea that comes up a lot in the literature of the time. So I think people were kind of on board with that as a literary artistic project.
HZ: But were people so on board with the literary artistic project of this Catholic Gaelic writing being by this Protestant Lowlander? Even the name's very first appearance in writing in the 1760s is fraught. All that, and the etymology of Fiona and the similar names that are old, or definitely older, coming up in part 2 a fortnight hence.
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Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
celsitude, noun: loftiness.
Try using ‘celsitude’ in an email today.
This episode all came about because of Harry Josie Giles, who is a performer and writer and her verse novel Deep Wheel Orcadia recently won the Arthur C Clarke award for science fiction book of the year! Congratulations to her, and also to Moll Heaton-Callaway for their phd thesis about Fiona Macleod and William Sharp. Thanks to Anne Pond at the National Maritime Museum in Cornwell for sharing her knowledge with Josie about Fiona the boat.
The episode was produced by me, with editorial advice from Martin Austwick, who also provides the original music for the Allusionist. Hear his compositions via palebirdmusic.com and as Pale Bird on Bandcamp.
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