Sherlock Holmes

When I left my very first job, with a publishing house in London, my leaving present was a two-volume set of The Complete Sherlock Holmes; and, as I discovered in the pub after my last day at work, the reason was that the colleague who had been empowered to choose the gift, had felt that I reminded him of Irene Adler! He was unable to be clearer than that - he couldn't tell me how, or in what ways, I reminded him of Irene Adler. It was simply, for him, a staement of fact. Now, for my part, I don't see any similarity between myself and Irene Adler, who has been portrayed on television

and in films by a number of leading actresses, but I don't imagine that my colleague at the time was necessarily thinking visually - although as a Graphic Designer, he may well have been; anyway, just for amusement - or as Graham Greene bracketed a number of his books, as beingr Entertainments - I looked out my copy of The Short Stories and started, it is the first in the book, with Conan Doyle's introduction of Miss Adler in A Scandal in Bohemia; even though I have read all of the storiew in the two volumes a number of times, there is always something familiar and comforting in settling down with them - whether they are read sequentially or at random, I feel that the character of Holmes as portrayed by Dr Watson, is so much a part of my own childhood , that it is like meeting an old friend after a period of separation.
I felt something akin to this when I read Julian Barnes' Arthur and George which features Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; he was an extremely complex character - probably far more so than his own Sherlock Holmes - and Barnes' book, which is based on The Great Wyrley Ouirages of 1903. There was a short television dramatisation broadcast earlier this year, with Martin Clunes as Conan Doyle.
And I poarticularly remember as a schoolgirl being enthralled by his Napoleonic series, featuring the dashing, gallane, heroic Brigadier Gerard; I did go through a rather odd period of wanting to be a man, but not just any man, a French Hussar - and I wore my jackets and coats in their style - not perhaps very proper for a well-bred Edinburgh lassie and confirming to the adults in the family that I was a bit of a Tom Boy.

But back to Irene Adler: She has been believed to have been based upon Lily Langtry - popularly known as The Jersey Lily from her childhood in Jersey, in the Channel Islands. She became a popular actress, had several husbands and many lovers and was mistress to several Royal persons. I do remember reading a long time ago that Oscar Wilde was infatuated with her and once spent a night sleeping on her London doorstep in hopes of meeting her in the morning (or parhaps being admitted during the night) - ah, such is adoration.