Doyle & Austen, Genre & Gender:

The majority of books are based on Sherlock Holmes or the works of Jane Austen. All of the titles on the list have a built in audience because they’re literary classics, but Holmes and Austen (I know, one’s fictional and one’s not, but Doyle’s other work is largely forgotten) have developed strong communities of enthusiasts, fans if you will, that produce and support writers. While every title on the list has a built-in audience of some size because they’re classics, the Austen and Doyle groups are larger and more coherent. These groups may develop fanon, ideas that gain a level of consensus among fans and recur frequently in the sequels and continuations: Elizabeth Darcy is consumed with worry over her failure to immediately conceive an heir while her sister pops out Bingleys at an alarming rate; Holmes stories should begin with an explanation of how “Watson’s” manuscript arrived in the “editor’s” hands.

The network of Holmes fans has such longevity that multiple layers of fan fiction have developed. In addition to stories featuring Holmes & Watson, there are books casting supporting characters like Irene Adler as sleuths in their own series; Nero Wolfe, who is strongly implied to be Holmes’s son in Rex Stout’s original series, has his own sequels by other authors; Holmes fans emulating the Master’s detecting methods form another subgenre within the larger group of pastiches; and Doyle has also appeared as an investigator himself in mysteries by several different authors, often paired with real-life friend Harry Houdini (my favorite is Escapade by Walter Satterthwait).

Although the Austen community is not as long-lived or prolific, it seems to be developing similar strata with Stephanie Barron’s series featuring Jane Austen as sleuth. The Jane Austen Book Club seems thematically similar to the mysteries where Holmes fans play detective.

Both Doyle and Austen also issued invitations to play with their work. Austen wrote about the continuing lives of her characters in letters to her family, and they were among the earliest to publish sequels to her novels. Doyle told William Gillette he could do “anything he liked” with Holmes when adapting the characters for a play in 1899. Maybe “invitation” is too purposeful a word, but each indicated that the text was not fixed but rather open to continuation or variation.

I find it interesting that the majority of Holmes fan fic in print is written by men, but the two major series are written by women: the Irene Adler series by Carole Nelson Douglas and the Mary Russell series by Laurie R. King. There is an organized and formal aspect to Holmes fandom in a network of named groups, the most famous being the Baker Street Irregulars, which used to be male-only. Online fandom, especially the part that overlaps with media fandom and reads/write fan fiction, is predominantly female. Austen fandom both on and offline is also predominantly female.

I’d also like to note that with Doyle and several other authors—Stoker, for example—the original texts are genre, and genres have communities that comprise both readers and writers, and there is frequent congress between them—readers become writers, writers remain readers, readers and writers attend virtual and real meeting places. This is certainly the case in the science fiction, mystery, and romance genres, and I suspect westerns as well. I believe that genre literature therefore has a lower barrier for fan fiction. I believe this is also true of literature by women. Male-authored “real” literature still has the highest prestige among cultural products, genre and woman-authored literature of any type has lesser prestige and thus a lower barrier/more accessibility. That’s my theory, and I’m sticking to it. For now.

Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: List Parameters
Part 3: Doyle & Austen
Part 4: Fan Fiction Categories
Part 5: Annotations