Educating Miss Holmes: How a female Sherlock could have gotten an education in the 1870's

(This is an ongoing series about the historical case for how canon Sherlock Holmes and John Watson could have been women. It is leading up to the launch of my new web novel series on Patreon, Ladies of Baker Street—a sapphic/wlw, Victorian women adaptation of Sherlock Holmes.

As usual, I’m using the hashtag #A Study In Victorian Women for this series, if you want to follow along. If this interests you, please follow me as well as comment on/like/share this post. Thanks!)

(Image credit: Cambridge Girton College Stanley, by Mary Evans, 1913)

After the harrowing experiences Dr. Watson and her peers experienced while trying to gain their medical degrees, the educational path for a Miss Holmes would seem at first to be much simpler.

And it’s true, to a point. But our goal here is not just to make sure Holmes is educated, but that she lines up as closely as possible to canon Holmes. Can that be done?

First, we need to know what we are up against. What is canon Sherlock Holmes’ education?

We only get a few hints here and there. It’s not like Dr. Watson’s proclamation in the first sentence of A Study in Scarlet of when and where and what kind of degree he got.

What we do know from the stories is that Holmes is of a slightly higher social class than Watson and may have descended from landed gentry. So his early schooling would probably have been from private tutors at home, and he may have attended a college such as Eton to prepare him for university. (Reminder to my non-British readers that such colleges were equivalent to middle schools and high schools in America, or any education system for 11-18 year olds.)

Other people suggest that Holmes may have avoided going to any of the elite boys’ colleges. He claims that he was “never a very sociable fellow” and preferred hanging out in his room doing his own thing rather than spending time with other students. He also did not participate in a lot of the sports that were popular with other school boys. His only sports were boxing and fencing.

But we really don’t know. What we do know is that he spent about two years at university. We don’t know which university, but it’s reasonable to assume it was probably one of the elite schools for upper-class men, such as Cambridge or Oxford. He was friends with Victor Trevor, whose father owned a wealthy estate, and the references he makes to his courses would indicate he had not chosen any particular course of study and was simply picking from things that interested him.

Finally, though we don’t know for certain what years he attended university, most people who spend time thinking about these things believe it was around 1874-1876, based on the events in The Gloria Scott.

We don’t know why he left school after two years or if he sat exams for any degree. He never mentions it. But we do find him in a laboratory at St. Barts doing chemical experiments when Dr. Watson first meets him, and Stamford is clear that he is not a medical student.

With that vague a background, we have a ton of options for educating Miss Holmes. What follows is just the path I chose for my version of her.