Thick as Thieves: Mothers, Gypsies, & Criminals in Enola Holmes’ Victorian England

Abstract

In her 2006 Young Adult novel, The Case of the Missing Marquess, Nancy Springer narrativises Enola Holmes as Sherlock Holmes’ intrepid and extraordinarily intelligent sister, a young woman with the ability to challenge even that great detective's iconic deductive abilities. I suggest that this overtly feminist impulse in rewriting the Victorian world of Conan Doyle is supplemented in Springer's novel with a nod toward the politics of intersectionality which attends to the ways in which gendered, class-based, and racialised identities become relational in an axiomatics of capitalist-colonialism. Particularly in conversation with Conan Doyle's 1892 short story, ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’, Springer's narrative takes a meta-critical neo-Victorian stance in encouraging its young audience to do three important things: first, mine the subtext of Conan Doyle's detective fiction for the broad anxieties it points to in imperial Victorian culture; second, probe the conditions of colonial commerce under which identities based in gender, race, and class differentials intersect with one another; and third, ask how to develop a decolonial praxis that in exposing such intersections, can avoid isolationist critical proclivities, and embrace instead a transnational and comparative sensibility of reading that is alive to at once specific and interrelated disempowerments.