J A N E T I L I T Y

It piques the imagination to think that Sherlock Holmes, literature’s foremost protagonist was an admirer of  Jane Austen. Certainly, we cannot agree with Watson when, in an early assessment of Holmes’s abilities, ranked his friend’s knowledge of literature as “nil”; after all, in The Boscombe Valley Mystery, it is Watson who, in want of reading material, settles for the hotel’s yellow-backed novel while Holmes travels with his “pocket Petrarch”.

Jane Austen’s romances would have little charm for Sherlock Holmes, who declared that “…love is an emotional thing and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true, cold reason which I place above all things.” The themes of charity, chivalry, prudence, as well as the pithy insights and the “pawky humor”, however, would have had considerable appeal, as would the tart exchanges – how could Holmes, who looked upon an invitation as “one of those unwelcome social summonses which call upon a man either to be bored or to lie” feel anything but affinity for a Darcy who disparages the entertainment of the evening with his, “Every savage can dance.”

Although Holmes remarks that “…life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent”, as a reader of Austen, he would have occasion to ponder the strange similarity between his professional life and Austen’s invented ones.

There is, for example, an interesting parallel between Lady Susan Vernon, of Austen’s epistolary novella Lady Susan, and Mrs. Isadora Klein, the antagonist in The Adventure of the Three Gables.

Lady Susan was written by Jane Austen more than a century before Sherlock Holmes would encounter Isadora Klein (William Baring-Gould’s ambitious chronology places The Three Gables in the spring of 1903 – the story was first published in 1920). Holmes pronounces Klein “the most lovely widow upon Earth”, though Watson observes that she has “reached the time of life when even the proudest beauty finds the half-light more welcome”. Lady Susan Vernon, likewise, is “the most accomplished coquette in England” is “excessively pretty”, although “a lady no longer young.”

Neither widow appears to be overcome with grief – Lady Susan Vernon, a month after her husband’s death, descends upon the household of the Manwarings, where she shamelessly flirts with her married host; in a letter to a friend, she writes that “the whole family are at war” and “the females of the family are united against me”; yet adds that she has “seldom spent three months more agreeably”.
When she is no longer welcome at the Manwarings’, she invites herself to the home of her in-laws, the Vernons, and is placed in the delicate position of keeping the persistent Manwaring at bay in order to work on the affections of Mrs. Vernon’s wealthy younger brother, Reginald deCourcy.

Similarly, Mrs. Klein mourns her husband’s passing with “an interval of adventure when she pleased her own tastes”, and one indulgence is her short-lived appetite for the passionate, but penniless Douglas Maberley. Maberley is as persistent as Manwaring, but Mrs. Klein does not have Lady Susan’s patience, nor her confidence that she can juggle the current lover with the former one – when Maberley will not give her up, Mrs. Klein has him brutally beaten and driven away, clearing the way for her to latch onto the wealthy Duke of Lomond, “who might almost be her son”, and leading to Maberley’s posthumous retaliation, which draws Holmes into the matter. Not that Lady Susan is any less vicious; when the irrepressible Sir James Martin annoys her, she writes, “I could have poisoned him.”

Both pairings – Mrs. Klein and the Duke, and Lady Susan and Reginald – face parental opposition. The Duke’s mother might overlook Mrs. Klein’s age, but would not tolerate the scandal that would certainly result from the publication of Maberley’s roman a clef; Reginald’s father cautions his son that Lady Susan’s “want of character” is a more serious concern than the difference in their ages.

Mrs. Klein is the more cautious of the two – perhaps she has learned something from reading Lady Susan as well! – she has tested her minions and pronounces them “…good hounds who run silent…They will take what comes to them. That is what they are paid for.” For Lady Susan, however, “…it is impossible to be sure of servants.” Both, however, are linked to a London gossip –Langdale Pike of The Three Gables is the “human book of reference upon all matters of social scandal”, a description that might as easily describe Lady Susan’s Alicia Johnson.

Was Holmes thinking of  Jane Austen’s droll conclusion to Lady Susan when he resolved the Maberley/Klein affair? Lady Susan Vernon does not marry Reginald; ironically, she marries Sir James, the heir she had picked out for her daughter. And while the Granada adaptation of The Three Gables has Holmes extract a promise from Mrs. Klein that she will break her engagement with the young Duke, the tale contains no such promise; Mrs. Klein suffers no significant consequence for her violent and criminal conduct other than the five thousand pounds she is compelled to pay to Maberley’s mother, a small price to attain the title of Duchess.

The next installment will discuss another pair of Austen and Sherlockian ladies.

Janetility welcomes discussion and comments, provided they are carried out with good-humor and good-breeding.