I was browsing through the index of the original Sherlock Holmes story, as one does, when a thought struck me. While Holmes' personal life was utterly devoid of women, his professional one was positively overflowing with them.
I think something like half the stories have a woman as his client. Additionally I'd estimate a solid 3/4 of the stories have a woman or several women, appear in a pivotal role, whether as victim, villain, or heroes.
And quite aside from the sheer number of women in Doyle's stories, there's also the range of them. We're presented with almost every type of woman imaginable. We have clever and competent women, craven women, women driven by ambition and devoid of empathy and compassion. We have warm women, cold women, women caught in circumstances beyond their control and those who take charge of those circumstances.
While I think it would be a reach to call Doyle's writing feminist, the fact remains that in the original Sherlock Holmes stories women are allowed a full range of humanity. Which quite frankly make the fact that adaptions too often fail abysmally on this account, though I think some interesting conclusions can be drawn between an adaptions insistence upon thrusting women into Holmes' personal life while simultaneously removing them from the prominence they held in his professional work.
