J A N E T I L I T Y

In reflecting upon the parallels between his professional life and episodes from the novels of Jane Austen, Sherlock Holmes would likely have seen a good deal of Mansfield Park’s Mary Crawford in Irene Adler, his adversary in A Scandal in Bohemia. Both Sherlock Holmes and Mansfield’s Edmund Bertram are second sons who find themselves captivated by brilliant, but morally compromised women. For Holmes, the “adventuress” Irene Adler is The Woman, who “eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex”; Edmund Bertram believes it “impossible…that he should ever meet with such another woman [as Mary Crawford].” Mary is “the only woman in the world whom [Edmund] could ever think of as a wife”; and while Holmes is not a marrying man, “there was but one woman to him, and that woman was…Irene Adler.”

There are the obvious similarities – Mary and Irene are brunette, charming, accomplished, musical – and the similarities of character: Mary is “active and fearless”; Irene is “quick and resolute”. Holmes’s client describes Adler: “She has the face of the most beautiful of women and the mind of the most resolute of men” with “a soul of steel”; Mary Crawford describes herself: “I will stake my last like a woman of spirit…I am not born to sit still and do nothing.”

Even before Holmes sees Irene Adler, the case would suggest Mansfield Park. When his gauche client, under the alias of “Count Von Kramm”, parades into Holmes’s sitting room in his “deep blue cloak lined with flame-colored silk”, would he not immediately call up an image of the obtuse Rushworth/Count Cassel and his “blue dress and a pink satin cloak”?

Count Cassel is a character in the play “Lovers’ Vows”, which the young people of Mansfield Park attempt to stage, with Mary Crawford taking the part of Amelia. Amelia is caught between an arranged marriage to the immoral Count and the possibility of a love match with the poor clergyman, Anhalt. Irene Adler, likewise, is between lovers – the hereditary King of Bohemia who has jilted her and the young lawyer who wants to marry her. It is interesting that Mary urges Edmund Bertram to at least “go into the law” rather than the church, implying that she could condescend to marry a lawyer (as Irene Adler does) but not a country clergyman.

Sherlock Holmes, always conscious of irony, would have recognized the ironic contrast between Irene’s real marriage, and the play upon marriage during the Bertrams’ visit to Sotherton, Maria Bertram’s future home. When Maria and her fiancé stand at the altar of the family chapel, their friends/witnesses remark that it is a pity Edmund is not yet ordained; only a clergyman is wanted for Maria and Rushworth to be married immediately. Irene Adler and her husband-to-be have secured a clergyman, but their vows are stalled for the lack of a witness – until Holmes is drafted into the role. It is an ironic touch – “a distinct touch”, as Holmes would have called it – that he infiltrates Adler’s household disguised as “a dear, kind old clergyman”.

Each story ends with the lady’s departure; Mary Crawford leaves Mansfield Park and settles in London. Irene Adler leaves England for the Continent “never to return”. But what of their futures?

Austen leaves Mary Crawford “long in finding among the dashing representatives or idle heir apparents…anyone who could satisfy the tastes she had acquired at Mansfield.” But it is unlikely that a woman who relishes the sort of “pure, genuine pleasure” she experiences in horseback riding, or the attractions of the Mansfield theatricals sat still and did nothing. Irene Adler, while married at the end of A Scandal in Bohemia, seems no closer to domestic tranquility than Mary. She has married a London lawyer and they have left England – but what are they to live on? Unless her husband is independently wealthy, they will have had to rely upon Irene’s talent to support them.

I wonder whether Mary Crawford, like Irene Adler, was formed for a life on the stage. “I have been trained as an actress myself,” Adler writes to Holmes and Edmund Bertram, thinking of Mary’s eagerness to take a part in “Lovers’ Vows” concludes, “…the charm of acting might well carry fascination to the mind of genius.”

Perhaps it was Mary Crawford, under the stage name of “Miss Rock” who portrayed Amelia when Lovers’ Vows was performed on January 6, 1820 at the Theatre-Royal in Edinburgh.

Another distinct touch, as January 6 was Sherlock Holmes’s birthday.

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