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Ella Freeman Sharpe's Collected Papers on Psychoanalysis, out of print for 28 years, has been reissued by Hogarth Press in London, and more recently, by Brunner/Mazel here.* Now one can understand the delight of those fortunate enough to have found secondhand copies of these papers through the years in out of the way places, for they have a special voice, a verve and excitement all their own. It is a quick voice nervous, excited, given to insights and aperçus but quite capable of stillness as well, as she follows a patient's tangled skein of associations with the help of her great love, Shakespeare, or—since her scholarship was prodigious—with the help of Rumpelstiltskin or Virginia Woolf's Manx cat.
She was born in Suffolk in 1875, the oldest of three girls, and the one closest to her father. “One of her earliest recollections was sitting at his feet while he read the plays of Shakespeare to the family,” (Wahl, 1966). When her father died during her adolescence, she undertook the responsibility for her mother and sisters, her duty she believed as the oldest child, and she maintained close family ties all her life. To this duty, she gave up her passion for English literature as a profession, although this passion never ceased to be the central one to inform her life. She knew Shakespeare by heart and her love of him and English literature was a wellspring that fed her theoretical knowledge of the unconscious when she became familiar with Freudian theory in her late 30s.
Her actual career as an analyst only began in her 50s. Before that she was a schoolmistress at several schools and finally a co-head at