51 pages • 1-hour read
The Case of the Missing Marquess
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Background
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, gender discrimination, physical abuse, and emotional abuse.
Series Context: The Enola Holmes Series
The Enola Holmes series, made up of nine novels and one short story, follows the much-younger sister of fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. In The Case of the Missing Marquess (2006), the first book in the series, Enola’s mother’s disappearance sets in motion a sequence of events that changes Enola’s life permanently. Her brothers—Sherlock and Mycroft—arrive at her countryside home for the first time in a decade. Mycroft, as the oldest sibling, takes charge of Enola and tries to force her to conform to gendered social norms for upper-class women of the time. Enola runs away, beginning her adventures by traveling to London, convinced she is destined to be her own kind of detective.
This first novel establishes Enola as an independent, brave, curious girl uninterested in conforming to her society’s prescribed understanding of a proper young lady’s place in the world. These qualities will drive her adventures throughout the series. In each subsequent novel, Enola encounters a mystery, usually centered on a missing person—a specialty inspired by both her missing mother and her encounter with Madame Laelia in The Case of the Missing Marquess. She continues to use disguises and ciphers as she solves each of the mysteries. Her continuing pursuit of her mother and her estrangement from her brothers, both plot points established in the series’s first book, create a larger plot arc for the series, as does Enola’s gradual maturation into adulthood.
Beginning in 2020, the Enola Holmes books were adapted into a series of films, with the third scheduled for release in 2026. They have also been adapted into a series of graphic novels, illustrated first by Séréna Blasco, then Lucie Arnoux.
Literary Context: Neo-Victorian Literature and The Sherlock Holmes Canon
Nancy Springer’s Enola Holmes books borrow characters, settings, and ideas from the Sherlock Holmes stories published in the late 1800s by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock Holmes appears in both short stories, such as those collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), and novels like A Study in Scarlet (1887) and The Sign of the Four (1890). Sherlock is a famous private detective who solves cases using logic, keen observation, and a deep understanding of forensic science. An eccentric character with a variety of idiosyncratic habits, he relies on the help of his friend and associate, Dr. John Watson, to keep his life running in an orderly way. Holmes’s ability to manage his own household is hampered by his bouts of depression and by his singular focus on the pursuit of answers to the mysteries he pursues. His great intelligence, his devotion to logic, and his depression contribute to Sherlock’s sometimes cold and unsociable attitude. John Watson is virtually his only friend, and his relationship with his older brother Mycroft is a distant one. The Sherlock Holmes stories are narrated by Watson, who is ostensibly chronicling his employer’s cases for the public.
Nancy Springer’s use of the Sherlock Holmes universe in her Enola Holmes books is an example of both “pastiche” and “Neo-Victorian” literature. A “pastiche” is a postmodern literary technique used to imitate the style, motifs, or characters of a past work or the works of a particular historical period. Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, in which Maguire builds his novel around the character of the Wicked Witch of the West and the world of Oz created in 1900 by L. Frank Baum, is a well-known example of pastiche. This novel was adapted into the hit Broadway show Wicked, which in turn was adapted as a two-part film series directed by Jon M. Chu and released in 2024 and 2025. In The Case of the Missing Marquess, Springer borrows the characters, settings, and conventions of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, as Enola adopts Sherlock’s methods of deduction. The Sherlock Holmes books are a common source for pastiche—other popular young adult novels that borrow from the Sherlock Holmes universe are Andrew Lane’s Death Cloud and Brittany Cavallaro’s Charlotte Holmes Mysteries series.
Neo-Victorian novels reimagine Victorian literature or period by combining its aesthetics with a more contemporary worldview. Traditional Victorian literature commented on and responded to Victorian society, while contemporary Neo-Victorian works use Victorian settings, characters, and plots to comment on and respond to the modern world. Well-known examples of Neo-Victorian novels that reimagine works or characters from the Victorian era are A. S. Byatt’s Possession and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. Young adult examples include William Ritter’s Jackaby, Robin Stevens’s Murder Most Unladylike, and Philip Pullman’s The Ruby in the Smoke.
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