Pickings are slim when it comes to choosing a female character from the Sherlock Holmes canon – in fact, there are only three of any great note: Mary Morstan, Irene Adler and Mrs Hudson.
Yet that hasn’t stopped other writers from finding all sorts of ways to add more, whether it’s giving Sherlock a Lost Lenore (Elizabeth in Young Sherlock Holmes), a little sister (Enola Holmes, Beatrice in Young Sherlock) or a daughter (Amelia Rojas in Sherlock & Daughter). Some adaptations gender-flip preexisting characters (Joan Watson in Elementary) or expand the roles of minor characters (there are female Irregulars in both Netflix’s The Irregulars and Sherlock Holmes and the Baker Street Irregulars), while Irene Adler has been reimagined as anything from a master thief to a criminal mastermind. And sometimes they simply make up female characters wholesale (Jennifer Vandeleur in The Case of the Silk Stocking or Xiao Wei in Young Sherlock).
In a way it’s rather heartening that so many writers want to include more women, giving me plenty to choose from this month. Though the obvious pick would be Irene Adler, I’ve already discussed her extensively in the past, and a hot contender was the aforementioned Xiao Wei, who reminded me a lot of Sara Lance in just how cool she was. There are very few female characters out there who are allowed to simply luxuriate in how cool they are.
But I’m going with Amelia Rojas from Sherlock & Daughter, because who doesn’t love a Spirited Young Lady living in the Victorian Era? That time of restrictiveness and societal disapproval is the perfect setting for a headstrong girl to come along and upset the apple cart.
Sherlock & Daughter puts Amelia Rojas at its centre; a Native American girl who has travelled from California to London in search of Sherlock Holmes in a bid to solve her mother’s murder. She’s determined and resourceful, but also far more vulnerable than she’d like to admit and leery about the veracity of her mother’s final message to her: that Sherlock is her father.
He denies this revelation, but also sees an opportunity to use her as an investigative proxy in a particularly difficult case: and so her education in deduction begins.
I’d never seen actress Blu Hunt before this series, but she’s a real find. Equal parts cunning and naïve, Amelia takes to mystery-solving like a duck to water, driven not only by personal reasons but a growing sense of duty and justice. As she tentatively begins to form a relationship with her would-be father, she also becomes aware of the greater plots and schemes swirling around her, and rises to meet them – not without a few mistakes at first, but steadily improving as she goes. It was a great first season for her, and I’m glad a second has already been greenlit.
