The curious case of Sherlock Holmes' feminist derivativesNetflix's Enola Holmes is just the latest attempt to insert a female protagonist into Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories.By Laura MillerSEPTEMBER 22, 2020 5H50When Dr. John Watson agreed to share accommodation with a friend of a friend in A Study in Scarlet in 1887, one of the great oases of popular fiction was born. Within the 221B Baker Street sanctuary, Holmes and Watson existed in a fantasy of late Victorian homosociality, a cross between Oxbridge's university life and irresponsible bohemia. His world was incomplete, but perfect, like all fantasies, as fascinating for what he excluded - regular hours, real jobs, sexuality and his discontent - as for the pipe smoke, disguises and idle shootings it contained. Arthur Conan Doyle got tired of everything long, long before his fans, and married Watson to a woman who mattered so little to his creator that he couldn't remember whether she was alive or dead, and he killed Holmes in 1893 Ten years later , popular demand forced Conan Doyle to resurrect the great detective, to which Watson returned to the Baker Street apartment.Fans around the world love the bubble in which Sherlock Holmes' stories take place, but at the same time, many cannot resist the urge to pop it. Holmes is the prototype of a certain type of male hero: indifferent, ascetic, a defender of pure rationalism and ostensibly immune to the emotions and traps of romantic love. (Mr. Spock from Star Trek is another.) Characters like that serve as batteries for the fanatics' imaginations; they generate pastiches and spinoffs and vast fan fiction databases. It is precisely because Holmes seems to have no common human weaknesses that writers of all kinds want to imagine him succumbing to them, whether it is cocaine addiction that forces him to undergo psychotherapy in Nicholas Meyer's 1974 novel, The Seven-Por- Cent Solution (adapted for the screen in 1976), or the secret passion for Watson himself that a subset of fans of the BBC TV series, Sherlock, believes to be encoded in each episode.