SILENCE FARM

London: Grant Richards, 1899. 2 pp undated ads plus 12 pp ads dated 1899. Original purple cloth. First Edition of this largely autobiographical novel, documenting the tension between the protagonist's poetic self and his bourgeois parents. Sharp had grown up in the Scottish Highlands, where at an early stage he acquired a vein of mystic pantheism. His family kept trying to guide him along conventional paths, such as that of an attorney's clerk in Glasgow and a bank clerk in London, but he kept seeking to write poetry and to roam about the mystical forests. Ultimately (beginning a few years before SILENCE FARM was published), Sharp began writing his more poetic or romantic works under the pseudonym "Fiona Macleod"; it is widely surmised that after the turn of the century "Fiona" was no longer simply a pseudonym but rather had become a separate personality, a sexual alter-ego, within Sharp. SILENCE FARM is sought as the book that best conveys Sharp's own telling of the boyhood that resulted in such an unusual adulthood. This is a just-about-fine copy (the slightest of rubbing) of a rather scarce title. NCBEL III 1065; curiously not in Colbeck.…