Nancy Springer: The Uncorseted Feminist

Nancy Springer, quite unknown to me, was born on the 5^th of July 1948 and spent 76 years of her life living life and writing a great deal about it. She has authored 50 novels, of which, I landed up with only one, namely the first of the series of Enola Holmes, the new detective in literature, a mythical figure as the imagined sister of Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes. Enola is a late child to her parents and causes much embarrassment to her much older brothers and perhaps her father too, whose sharp brains of reason and rationality and hence puritanical would hate sex and reproduction. The three men wish her nonexistent and are dismissive towards her. As the father dies, Mycroft inherits the estate and pushes mother and the sister into his mercy. We get a Jane Austen’s world as the feminine gender inherit the stranglehold of male control over their destinies through the male heir of the patriarch.

The mother then suddenly disappears leaving Enola, all fourteen, to fend for herself helped by a faithful dog and loyal servants. It seems that mother, taking advantage of the male indifference towards how women manage their domestic chores, creates fake lists of activities and employers, draws allowances on those and then embezzles out of her monthly budgets. This money, now quite a sum, is left for Enola to discover by decoding the puzzles involving the language of flowers. This brings us to

On hearing of her disappearance, the brothers arrive. Sherlock arranges for the London police to locate the missing mother while Mycroft stays back to organize Enola’s life. In sum, she is to be sent to a boarding school. It is in those preparations that Enola experiences the repression of patriarchy. Notwithstanding the size of her head, which is smaller than that of an adult male which prompts her brothers to say that she is small brained, she is made to feel fatter as she is pushed into a steel corset to give her a dainty figure and carried off to the school for as tight-fitting academic training as her clothing. It is the entitled domination by her brothers and the corset that Enola suddenly understands why her mother disappeared; she disappeared to escape control. While not finding her mother, Enola naturally is inclined to looking towards the misfits, mostly the gypsies. Here is Enid Blyton, the runaway child and the gypsies.

There is a long description of London, bringing us right into Sherlock’s own habit. Here is Conan Doyle. The pitiable poverty of London, crimes born out of those, diviners who locate missing persons, cross dressers and disguised criminals and eventually Enola’s finding of the missing prince with her sheer intuition and groundwork shows her as several steps ahead of her deductive and logical brother.

Once the mother’s missing report is filed and the missing prince been found, it is now the turn for the police to set upon the task of hunting down Enola. Here we suddenly have Mark Twain moments, with the prince wanting to be the pauper. Enola becomes at once a Robin Hood and a Florence Nightingale, a lady in the black gown of a widow going about the streets helping the poor, the ascetic, the nurse, the messiah of the poor, all rolled into one. One has to read through the book to know why Florence Nightingale, Sister Nivedita and Mother Teresa, fled home, to avoid the steel cage of the corset which came with the iron grip of patriarchy.