★★★★☆ Clothes make the Victorian girl

The Case of the Missing Marquess

Nancy Springer

The Case of the Missing Marquess is the first book in Nancy Springer's Enola Holmes series. Thus, its main business is to tell us who and what kind of person Enola Holmes is. Mystery purists (I am not one) may be disappointed by the shallowness of the mystery of the Missing Marquess, which is less than half of the book and which Enola solves almost instantly simply by virtue of being a teenage kid herself (like the Marquess -- well, actually, he's 12, but close enough) and guessing correctly what he would do.

The much bigger mystery, which is not solved here, concerns Enola's mother Lady Eudoria Holmes, who is also the widowed mother of Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes. Lady Eudoria is known to associate with suffragettes, and to wear "rationals" -- that is, comfortable and practical clothing of a type that is widely considered inappropriate women's wear in Victorian society. On Enola's 14th birthday Lady Eudoria walks out of her home and vanishes. As she leaves she tells Enola, as she has been wont to do every day "You’ll do very well on your own." This becomes more or less the theme of the novel, and I suspect, the entire series. Enola notes that her name, spelled backward, is "alone".

Mycroft and Sherlock show up at the Holmes estate. They turn out to have attitudes towards "females" typical of Victorian men, meaning, by 21st-century standards, they are sexist pigs. (This tracks with Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories in which Watson often remarks on Holmes' misogyny, though without using that word.) They are now Enola's legal guardians -- indeed, they have been ever since their father died, although they were content to leave her in her mother's hands. Mycroft makes plans to send Enola to a finishing school.

Enola is having none of it. Her fight to stay out of her brothers' clutches is most of the story, and will, I anticipate, be the central story of the series.

I read a lot of fantasy and science fiction, and therefore notice world-building. Springer's Victorian England is, of course, historical, not fictional, but I still felt myself in the hands of a writer creating a world for her readers. The importance of clothing particularly struck me. In Victorian England even more than now, there were all kinds of complicated rules about what women were allowed to wear as well as complicated rules about what a woman's choice of clothing meant, not to mention extraordinarily complicated clothing. (These statements are also true for men's wear, but then as now women were judged much more by their clothing than men.) Clothing is Enola's armor and armament.

In summary, this was a lot of fun. Enola is a teenage girl fighting valiantly and intelligently for her independence. She is no insufferable Sherlock Holmes -- she has feelings and she makes mistakes -- but that's realistic and just makes the story better. I might suggest that F&SF readers will find Enola Holmes has a feel of speculative fiction.

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