Robert Harborough Sherard was born in London on 3 December 1861, the fourth child of the Reverend Bennet Sherard Calcraft Kennedy. His father was the illegitimate son of the sixth and last Earl of Harborough and his mother, Jane Stanley Wordsworth, granddaughter of the poet. In 1880 he went up to New College, Oxford but after a quarrel with his father, who cut him off from the expected family inheritance, was forced to leave for financial reasons. At this time he dropped the surname Kennedy. He left for Europe and later enrolled at the University of Bonn to study law and oriental languages, but again had to leave for lack of money. At the age of twenty he settled in Paris to earn his living as a journalist and novelist. In Paris he became acquainted with a number of the leading French literary figures of the eighties and nineties, including Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant and Alphonse Daudet, and also with Oscar Wilde, with whom he formed a close friendship, although they fell out after Wilde's release from prison. In 1902, two years after Wilde's death, he published Oscar Wilde: the story of an unhappy friendship, which was to be the first of several works in which he maintained Wilde's innocence of the charge of homosexuality. Others include Oscar Wilde twice defended (1934) and Bernard Shaw, Frank Harris and Oscar Wilde (1936).
Sherard supported himself mostly from journalism, contributing articles to papers in France, England and America. He was also a prolific writer of novels, biographies and social commentaries, publishing thirty-three works in total. The biographies, besides those on Wilde, are Emile Zola (1893), Alphonse Daudet (1894), and Guy de Maupassant (1926). His social investigations, during which he lived with the poor and studied their conditions, resulted in works such as The White Slaves of England (l897). He lived in France for most of his life but died in Ealing on 30 January 1943.
From the guide to the Papers of Robert Harborough Sherard, 1887-1957 (bulk 1910-1943), (Reading University: Special Collections Services)
