Fiona MacLeod was a pseudonym used by the Scottish writer William Sharp (1855 - 1905) from 1893. In the biography Sharp constructed for Fiona Macleod, she is identified as a Highland cousin with a knowledge of Gaelic. The Gaelic deployed in her writings seems to have been derived from Mary Mackellar's Tourists Hand-book of Gaelic and English Phrases for the Highlands (c.1882).