The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1892

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“The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”Chapter Summaries & Analyses

“The Adventure of the Copper Beeches” Summary

A young orphan woman, Violet Hunter, comes to Holmes for advice on whether to accept a strange, but well-paying position in the countryside. She is a governess and her potential employers, a well-off landowner and his second wife, want her to take care of their young son, but also to fulfill strange requests, such as cutting off her beautiful hair, wearing a specific dress, and sitting by the window for long periods.

Holmes suspects something is amiss but does not believe there to be an immediate danger. The young woman accepts the job as she is destitute and after a few weeks telegraphs Holmes to come and help her. While living in the manor, called the Copper Beeches, she has discovered that someone is being kept locked in one of the wings. The detective concludes that it is the family’s older daughter, who has the right to a large part of the estate. She was engaged to marry a local man, but her father did not want to lose the money, so he and his second wife locked her up after an illness. Violet resembles her and was hired to fool the fiancé into thinking that the daughter no longer wants to marry him.

When Holmes, Watson, and Violet arrive at the manor and attempt a rescue, they discover that the daughter has already fled with her fiancé. The father is attacked by his guard dog and will remain an invalid for the rest of his life.

“The Adventure of the Copper Beeches” Analysis

This is one of the three stories in the volume that presents an active and engaging young woman. What is more, Violet is depicted as intelligent and wise, understanding the dangers someone in her position faces. She has enough foresight to consult someone more experienced about her choices and is both brave and moral. Violet is more concerned with the person held prisoner and with doing the right thing, than with her self-interest. Watson also finds her sympathetic and even believes her to be a potential love interest for the detective, as he concludes the story by saying that “my friend Holmes, rather to my disappointment, manifested no further interest in her” (253). True to form, the detective does not care about Violet herself but simply about the puzzle she brings up. Furthermore, she might be intelligent, but she lacks observation and deduction skills and is not particularly cunning, unlike Irene Adler.

While Watson is usually very complimentary towards his friend, in this story we get a glimpse of a negative interaction between the two. Watson remarks that he was “repelled by the egotism” he often sees displayed by Holmes (231). This detail serves to remind readers that the detective might be highly intelligent and rarely wrong, but he has weaknesses. Being self-centered or egotistic is one of them. In the same passage, Holmes also expresses some displeasure at Watson’s writing, criticizing him for writing stories, rather than giving lectures. Such an interaction makes both characters seem more human and believable. It also highlights the sincere nature of their friendship. They like and respect each other even knowing the other person’s negative attributes.

This is another story that alludes to Gothic literature. Most of the story’s elements (an isolated manor, a beautiful protagonist, a mysterious prisoner, and a strange situation) all contribute to creating an atmosphere of unease. However, there are no supernatural elements, and all the strange occurrences are explained logically by Holmes’s deductions. In this way, the detective takes the mystery out of the scenario and brings it down to the level of mundane crime. The unexpected turn of events at the end is in keeping with the detective genre.