Enola Holmes: The Netflix Movie's Biggest Changes To The Book
Netflix's Enola Holmes is based on the first book from Nancy Springer's series The Enola Holmes Mysteries, and here's how much it was changed.
Netflix’s Enola Holmes is based on the first book of Nancy Springer’s The Enola Holmes Mysteries series, and here are the biggest changes it made to the book. Sherlock Holmes has become one of the most popular and beloved literary characters and has been adapted to all types of media for over a hundred years. The Great Detective and other characters from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories have also been used by other artists to create new stories, and some have even expanded their backstories by adding new characters.
Among those is Nancy Springer, who gave Sherlock and Mycroft a younger sister in the book series The Enola Holmes Mysteries. The third Holmes sibling, Enola, is 20 years younger than Sherlock and stopped seeing her brothers when she was four-years-old, as they left their family home after various disagreements with their mother, Eudoria. The Holmes siblings reunited many years later when Eudoria disappeared on Enola’s 14th birthday, which was the event that sent Enola on a journey of self-discovery while she investigated her disappearance.
The Netflix film Enola Holmes is based on the first book of the series, titled The Case of the Missing Marquess, and while it follows the premise described above, it also made some changes not only to the story and the cases but to Enola herself. Although some of these changes were quite big, they were all to better fit the themes the movie wanted to address, and don’t do much harm to the characters. Here are the biggest changes Enola Holmes made to the book.
Enola Holmes is 20 years younger than Sherlock, which has earned their mother a few nasty looks from the community. Enola tells the reader she hasn’t seen her brothers in 10 years, as they left their family home to never come back. As mentioned above, Eudoria disappeared on Enola’s 14th birthday, which the movie changed to her 16th birthday. Millie Bobby Brown, who plays Enola in the movie, is 16-years-old, and this change in the character’s age is also more on par with the adventures and experience she has, and it makes it easier for Brown to reprise her role in a sequel.
Mycroft Holmes wasn’t pleased to discover that all the money he had been sending to his mother for years hadn’t been used for what she claimed she needed, especially Enola’s tutors. As it turns out, Enola had never had a tutor, and Eudoria educated her herself, which to Mycroft was unacceptable. As the oldest Holmes sibling, Mycroft took on the role of guardian of Enola and decided to send her to a school for young ladies. In the movie, Enola is caught and taken back to her home, and Mycroft later takes her to school. In the book, however, this never happens, and she successfully manages to avoid her brother, and doesn’t set foot on any boarding school.
By the end of the book, and just like in the movie, Enola continues hiding from her brothers, but she creates two different personas in order to hide in plain sight: one is a veiled, non-speaking woman known as “the Sister”, and the other is Ivy Meshle, secretary to an investigator. It’s through the latter that Enola plans on continue taking cases without relying on her last name and without being turned down for being a girl.
While investigating her mother’s disappearance, Enola comes across interesting news: Viscount Lord Tewksbury has gone missing and is suspected to have been kidnapped. Enola decides to put the search for her mother on hold for a while and investigate what could have happened to Tewksbury. The young Viscount willingly left his home with plans of going to the sea on a boat but was kidnapped on his way there. Enola was also kidnapped and taken to the same boat where Tewksbury was being held captive, and the people behind it all were two men that went by the names of Cutter and Squeaky. The latter disguised himself as Madame Laelia Sibyl de Papaver, a spiritualist medium, in order to infiltrate the house of the Viscount and prompt the parents to offer a ransom that he and Cutter would later collect.
Tewksbury (whose name was slightly changed in the movie) was also younger than in the movie, being only 12-years-old. In Enola Holmes, Tewkesbury is played by Louis Partridge, and he’s – at least – the same age as Enola. At the end of the book, Enola takes Tewksbury to the police station, where they come across with Lestrade and Sherlock. In order to avoid being caught, Enola escapes and leaves Tewksbury there, without Sherlock even noticing she had been there.
Enola’s adventure with the case of the missing Viscount would have never happened had her mother not disappeared. Eudoria Holmes was a free spirit who refused to follow gender standards, something she taught Enola. Very much like in the movie, Eudoria leaves a letter in code to her daughter, who later posts coded messages on different newspapers in hopes that her mother would read them and contact her, somehow. What changed, however, were Eudoria’s reasons to leave. In Enola Holmes, Eudoria was part of a secret society and was working on a bombing plan. By the end of the movie, she tracks down Enola and briefly reunites with her, only telling her she left so she could be free, and because she “couldn’t bear to have this world be her future”. In the book, Eudoria and Enola never reunite, but Eudoria does send a message to her daughter revealing she went away with the Romani to live a free wandering life.
After almost being caught by Sherlock at the police station, Enola continues hiding from her brothers, especially Mycroft, and continues making her way in the world as a detective and a free young woman. In the book, Enola mentions that, while Sherlock is skilled in different things that go from chemistry to boxing, her abilities are limited to writing, reading, fishing, finding bird nests, and digging up worms. By the end of the book, Enola realizes she has learned a lot now that she broke free from her home and her family, which further motivates her to continue building her own career as a detective.
Enola made the mistake of revealing her name when she met Lestrade at Tewksbury’s home, and learning from that, she creates the different personas mentioned above (“the Sister” and Ivy Meshle). In the movie, after Enola escapes from school and the case of the Viscount comes to an end, she doesn’t accidentally come across with her famous brother. Instead, Sherlock tries to trick her into meeting him and Mycroft by posting a coded message supposedly from Eudoria, but Enola realizes almost immediately that it’s not her mother who wrote it, and Sherlock knew her sister wasn’t going to fall, yet he hoped she would come. Enola went to the meeting place but never revealed herself, instead disguising herself as a newsboy. She does, however, leave an old toy for Sherlock to find, and he chooses not to look for her.
In both the book and the movie, the story leaves the door wide open for Enola to continue taking different cases and hiding from her brothers, with the movie also making it possible for characters like Tewkesbury and Eudoria to come back in future sequels. Luckily for Enola Holmes, it has five more books to take inspiration from, though they will also have to go through a couple of changes after what this first movie established.