A Soul of Steel (A Novel of Suspense featuring Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes)

by Douglas, Carole Nelson

  A SOUL OF STEEL

  READERS GUIDE

  "Perhaps it has taken until the end of this century for an author like Douglas to be able to imagine a female protagonist who could be called 'the’ woman by Sherlock Holmes."

  —GROUNDS FOR MURDER, 1991

  "With Good Night, Mr. Holmes Douglas ushered in a 1990’s explosion of women-centered history-mystery, reschooling us about the ornery presence of women in both social and literary history.”—JO ELLYN CLAREY, THEY DIED IN VAIN

  ABOUT THIS READERS GROUP GUIDE

  To encourage the reading and discussion of Carole Nelson Douglas’ acclaimed novels examining the Victorian world from the viewpoint of one of the most mysterious woman in literature, the following descriptions and discussion topics are offered. The author interview, biography, and bibliography at the end will aid discussion as well.

  Set in the 1880-1889 London, Paris, Prague, Monaco, Transylvania, and later the U.S. and New York City, the Irene Adler novels reinvent the only woman to have outwitted Sherlock Holmes as the complex and compelling protagonist of her own stories.

  Douglas’ portrayal of “this remarkable heroine and her keen perspective on the male society in which she must make her independent way,” noted the New York Times, recasts her “not as a loose-living adventuress but a woman ahead of her time.”

  In Douglas’ hands, the fascinating but sketchy American prima donna from “A Scandal in Bohemia” becomes an aspiring opera singer moonlighting as a private inquiry agent. When events force her from the stage into the art of detection, Adler’s exploits rival those of Sherlock Holmes himself as she crosses paths and swords with the day’s leading creative and political figures while sleuthing among the Bad and the Beautiful of pre-Belle Epoque Europe.

  Critics praise the novels’ rich period detail, numerous historical characters, original perspective, wit, and “welcome window on things Victorian.”

  “The private and public escapades of Irene Adler Norton [are] as erratic and unexpected and brilliant as the character herself,” noted Mystery Scene of Another Scandal in Bohemia (formerly Irene’s Last Waltz), “a long and complex jeu d’esprit, simultaneously modeling itself on and critiquing Doylesque novels of ratiocination coupled with emotional distancing. Here is Sherlock Holmes in skirts, but as a detective with an artistic temperament and the passion to match, with the intellect to penetrate to the heart of a crime and the heart to show compassion for the intellect behind it.”

  ABOUT THIS BOOK

  A SOUL OF STEEL is the third Irene Adler novel. It opens in 1888 in Paris, where the newly wedded Irene and her barrister husband Godfrey have fled after eluding the King of Bohemia and Sherlock Holmes in London. Irene’s loyal companion—spinster and parson’s daughter Nell Huxleigh—has joined the couple in their rural retreat near Paris. While the worldly Irene relishes her new Paris home, Nell remains true to the time’s limited expectations of a Victorian woman and fears the corrupting Parisian influence on British rectitude. However, the mystifying and the murderous follow Irene wherever she goes, or she finds them.

  This time Godfrey and the two women are present at a sidewalk café in Paris when a man in ragged Oriental grab cries, “Miss Huxleigh” and faint’s at Nell’s feet. It becomes clear that the man is not only from a family far above Nell’s station, the Stanhopes, for which she was once a governess, but has been poisoned. The puzzle of Quinton Stanhope’s history as a spy and his quest to save a certain English “Dr. Watson” from imminent death draws the trio back to London, even though Irene and her husband Godfrey are presumed dead in an Alpine train crash. The case has the trio again brushing shoulders with Irene’s new friend, actress Sarah Bernhardt and with sinister forces new and old. They will cross investigations with a certain consulting detective from London who is making an international name for himself, Sherlock Holmes.

  FOR DISCUSSION OF THIS BOOK

  1. This title is taken from how the King of Bohemia refers to Irene Adler when discussing her with Holmes in “A Scandal in Bohemia.” He tells Holmes: “She has a soul of steel; the face of the most beautiful of women and the mind of the most resolute of men.”

  Watson, though, calls Irene Adler an “adventuress.” In Good Night, Mr. Holmes, the first Irene Adler novel, Holmes challenges Watson’s use of the word.

  “How unfair it is that enterprise is called a harlot when it wears a female face... You call her an ‘adventuress’ as well. Two centuries ago the word designated a woman who lived by her wits. Today it has been debased to describe a woman who lives by her willingness—especially in regard to men of influence and wealth. I believe you misjudge Madam Irene there.”

  In all male-written Holmes post-Doyle books and films Irene Adler is portrayed as a “Victorian vamp,” Douglas points out, “a woman of easy virtue.” Most scenarios got rid of Godfrey Norton as soon as possible. In Douglas’s books, Irene is not unworldly, but she’s a happily married woman. Why did Douglas do that? Does that change the level of Holmes’s estimation of her? Does that make any romantic element between the two more or less likely? What would you call their relationship now? Rivals? Frenemies?

  2. In the series, Irene Alder has disdained to use her stage glamour to seduce and mistress wealthy men, which makes her atypical of the time’s performing sisterhood Where does her personal morality come from? Is it pride in making her way with her art and talent alone? Lillie Langtry, the Prince of Wale’s one-time mistress, went on the stage afterward, but she was no actress. To be an opera singer would require years of study, wearing costumes that could weigh as much as sixty pounds and projecting the voice to the far corners of massive European opera houses... without a microphone. Is this loss of this career because she must keep up the pretense that she is dead a blow! How do her investigations use the ploys of her former profession? Has she now become writer, director and actor of her own life?

  3. In this novel, Nell’s duties and horizons expand into doing actual detective work. Is she successful at it? Given her strict moral upbringing, can she justify pretense and untruth for the important end in saving a man’s life? She also finds an early draft of “The Scandal in Bohemia” and learns of Sherlock Holmes’s use of the cocaine needle and his high opinion of Irene as “the” woman. She also revisits the scene of her earlier employment and meets people she is fond of. How could these elements affect Nell’s future role in the Norton household?

  4. Nell has never cherished romantic ambitions, seemingly content as a spinster, although she’s very fond of Godfrey, and vice versa. What does meeting Quenton Stanhope again do to her equilibrium? Now that he is “beyond the pale” of his own class, can she accept her early admiration as the youthful “crush” it was and enter into a more mature relationship with him? Is he the man for her?

  5. Doyle made Irene Adler bright, beautiful, and daring... and promptly killed her in the literary sense, for the story that celebrates her also introduces her as “the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.” Douglas had to resurrect her and explain the apparent death to continue her story, and her relationship to Sherlock Holmes. Does the fact that Irene Adler is an renaissance woman—intelligent, artistically gifted, courageous—make her less appealing? Is she any less or more extravagant in her gifts than Sherlock Holmes?

  Do readers resent in women what they accept in men? Do women particularly do this to other women? Is that why Nell Huxleigh, the more conventional recorder, is a reader favorite? And why Watson is regarded with more affection if not admiration than Holmes? Do superheroes whether Holmes or Adler, Batman or Xena the Warrior Princess, need sidekicks we can identify with to humanize them? What other superheroes does our culture offer? How many are women as opposed to men? Do you have any?

  FOR DISCUSSION OF THIS SERIES

  1. Douglas mentions other authors, many of them women, who have reinvented major female characters or minor characters from classic literary or genre novels to re-evaluate culture then and now. Can you think of such works
in the field of fantasy or historical novels? General literature? What about the copyright contest over The Wind Done Gone, Alice Randall’s reimagining of Gone with the Wind events and characters from the African-American slaves’ viewpoints? Could the novel’s important social points have been made as effectively without referencing the classic work generally familiar to most people? What other works have attained the mythic status that might make possible such socially conscious reinventions? What works would you revisit or rewrite?

  2. Religion and morality are underlying issues in the novels, including the time’s anti-Semitism. This is an element absent from the Holmes stories. How is this issue brought out and how do Nell’s strictly conventional views affect those around her? She not only embodies the limited lives of “proper” Victorian women, but she despises anything “French” to a ridiculous degree. The English and the French have a centuries-long history of mutual dislike, but why is Nell so xenophobic? Why does she take on a moral watchdog role yet remain both disapproving and fascinated by Irene’s pragmatic philosophy? Why is Irene (and also most readers) so fond of her despite her limited opinions?

  3. Douglas chose to blend humor with the adventurous plots. Do comic characters and situations satirize the times, or soften them? Is humor a more effective form of social criticism than rhetoric? What other writers and novelists can you think of who use this technique, besides George Bernard Shaw and Mark Twain?

  4. The novels also present a continuing tension between New World and Old World, America and England and the Continent, artist/tradesman and aristocrat, and as well as woman and man. Which characters reflect which camps? How does the tension show itself?

  5. Chapel Noir, the series’ fifth novel, makes several references to Dracula through the presence of Bram Stoker some six years before his novel actually was published. Stoker is also a continuing character in other Adler novels. Various literary figures appear in the Adler novels, including Oscar Wilde, and most of these historical characters knew each other. Why was this period so rich in writers who founded much modem genre fiction, like Doyle and Stoker? The late-nineteenth century produced not only Dracula and Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories and the surviving dinosaurs of The Lost World, but Trilby and Svengali, The Phantom of the Opera, The Prisoner of Zenda, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds, some of the earliest and most lasting works of science fiction, political intrigue, mystery and horror. How does Douglas pay homage to this tradition in the plots, characters, and details of the Adler novels?

  AN INTERVIEW WITH CAROLE NELSON DOUGLAS

  Q: You were the first woman to write about the Sherlock Holmes world from the viewpoint of one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s women characters, and the first woman to openly write a Holmes-related novel at all. Why?

  A: Most of my fiction ideas stem from my role as social observer in my first career, journalism. One day I looked at the mystery field and realized that all post-Doyle Sherlockian novels were written by men. (A Canadian woman had been published with three pastiches under her first two initials and surname.) I had loved the stories as a child and thought it was high time for a woman to examine the subject from a female point of view.

  Q: So there was “the woman,” Irene Adler, the only woman to outwit Holmes, waiting for you.

  A: She seems the most obvious candidate, but I bypassed her for that very reason to look at other women in what is called the Holmes Canon. Eventually I came back to “A Scandal in Bohemia.” Rereading it, I realized that male writers had all taken Irene Adler at face value as the King of Bohemia’s jilted mistress, but the story doesn’t support that. As the only woman in the Canon who stirred a hint of romantic interest in the aloof Holmes, Irene Adler had to be more than this beautiful but amoral “Victorian vamp.” Once I saw that I could validly interpret her as a gifted and serious performing artist, I had my protagonist.

  Q: It was that simple?

  A: It was that complex. I felt that any deeper psychological exploration of this character still had to adhere to Doyle’s story, both literally and in regard to the author’s own feeling toward the character. That’s how I ended up having to explain that operatic impossibility, a contralto prima donna. It’s been great fun justifying Doyle’s error by finding operatic roles Irene could conceivably sing. My Irene Adler is as intelligent, self-sufficient, and serious about her professional and personal integrity as Sherlock Holmes, and far too independent to be anyone s mistress but her own. She also moonlights as an inquiry agent while building her performing career. In many ways they are flip sides of the same coin: her profession, music, is his hobby. His profession, detection, is her secondary career. Her adventures intertwine with Holmes’s, but she is definitely her own woman in these novels.

  Q: How did Doyle feel toward the character of Irene Adler?

  A: I believe that Holmes and Watson expressed two sides of Dr. Doyle: Watson the medical and scientific man, also the staunch upholder of British convention; Holmes the creative and bohemian writer, fascinated by the criminal and the bizarre. Doyle wrote classic stories of horror and science fiction as well as hefty historical novels set in the age of chivalry. His mixed feelings of attraction and fear toward a liberated, artistic woman like Irene Adler led him “kill” her as soon as he created her. Watson states she is dead at the beginning of the story that introduces her. Irene was literally too hot for Doyle as well as Holmes to handle. She also debuted (and exited) in the first Holmes/Watson story Doyle ever wrote. Perhaps Doyle wanted to establish an unattainable woman to excuse Holmes remaining a bachelor and aloof from matters of the heart. What he did was to create a fascinatingly unrealized character for generations of readers.

  Q: Do your protagonists represent a split personality as well?

  A: Yes, one even more sociologically interesting than the Holmes/Watson split because it embodies the evolving roles of women in the late nineteenth century. As a larger-than-life heroine, Irene is “up to anything.” Her biographer, Penelope “Nell” Huxleigh, however, is the very model of traditional Victorian womanhood. Together they provide a seriocomic point-counterpoint on women’s restricted roles then and now. Narrator Nell is the character who “grows” most during the series as the unconventional Irene forces her to see herself and her times in a broader perspective. This is something women writers have been doing in the past two decades: revisiting classic literary terrains and bringing the sketchy women characters into full-bodied prominence.

  Q: What of “the husband,” Godfrey Norton?

  A: In my novels, Irene’s husband, Godfrey Norton, is more than the “tall, dark, and dashing barrister” Doyle gave her. I made him the son of a woman wronged by England’s then female-punitive divorce law, so he is a “supporting” character in every sense of the word. These novels are that rare bird in literature: female “buddy” books. Godfrey fulfills the useful, decorative, and faithful role so often played by women and wives in fiction and real fife. Sherlockians anxious to unite Adler and Holmes have tried to oust Godfrey. William S. Baring-Gould even depicted him as a wife-beater in order to promote a later assignation with Holmes that produced Nero Wolfe! That is such an unbelievable violation of a strong female character’s psychology. That scenario would make Irene Adler a two-time loser in her choice of men and a masochist to boot. My protagonist is a world away from that notion and a wonderful vehicle for subtle but sharp feminist comment.

  Q: Did you give her any attributes not found in the Doyle story?

  A: I gave her one of Holmes’ bad habits. She smokes “little cigars.” Smoking was an act of rebellion for women then, and because Doyle shows her sometimes donning male dress to go unhampered into public places. I also gave her “a wicked little revolver” to carry. When Doyle put her in male disguise at the end of his story, I doubt he was thinking of the modem psychosexual ramifications of cross-dressing.

  Q: Essentially, you have changed Irene Adler from an ornamental woman to a working woman.<
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  A: My Irene is more a rival than a romantic interest for Holmes, yes. She is not a logical detective in the same mold as he, but is as gifted in her intuitive way. Nor is her opera singing a convenient profession for a beauty of the day, but a passionate vocation that was taken from her by the King of Bohemia’s autocratic attitude toward women, forcing her to occupy herself with detection. Although Doyle’s Irene is beautiful, well dressed, and clever, my Irene demands that she be taken seriously despite these feminine attributes.

  I like to write “against” conventions that are no longer true, or were never true. This is the thread that runs through all my fiction: my dissatisfaction with the portrayal of women in literary and popular fiction then and even now. This begins with Amberleigh—my postfeminist mainstream version of the Gothic revival popular novels of the 1960s and 1970s—and continues with Irene Adler today. I’m interested in women as survivors. Men also interest me of necessity, men strong enough to escape cultural blinders to become equal partners to strong women.

  Q: How do you research these books?

  A: From a lifetime of reading English literature and a theatrical background that educated me on the clothing, culture, customs, and speech of various historical periods. I was reading Oscar Wilde plays when I was eight years old. My mother’s book club meant that I cut my teeth on Eliot, Balzac, Kipling, Poe, poetry, Greek mythology, Hawthorne, the Brontës, Dumas, and Dickens. Then I went to school and libraries and met a thousand other authors.

  In doing research, I have a fortunate facility of using every nugget I find, or of finding that every little fascinating nugget works itself into the story. Perhaps that’s because journalists must be ingenious in using every fact available to make a story as complete and accurate as possible under deadline conditions. Often the smallest mustard seed of research swells into an entire tree of plot. The corpse on the dining-room table of Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, was too macabre to resist and spurred the entire plot of the second Adler novel, The Adventuress (formerly Good Morning, Irene). Stoker rescued a drowning man from the Thames and carried him home for revival efforts, but it was too late.