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The Adventure of the Yellow Face
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Sherlock Holmes 2025: Week 05/Story 03 - Adventure of the Yellow Face, The
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The Adventure of the Yellow Face (The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes)
Discussion Questions
1) When Grant Munro explained the problem he’d been having with his wife, Effie, what did you think the issue separating them could have been?
2) What did you first believe was the connection between Effie and the old woman in the cottage? Why?
3) Do you think Effie should have told her husband about her child before she married him? Why or why not?
4) What was Effie’s reasoning for hiding her child from the world? Do you think she was justified in doing so?
5) How do you feel about Mr. Munro taking in his wife’s daughter as a child of his own?
6) Given that interracial marriage was illegal in Georgia until the mid-20th century, do you think this story could be historically accurate?
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Holmes' idea of blackmail and/or bigamy was very clever, and I didn't consider this mystery a "failure" on his part just because he couldn't guess/deduce the presence of a child.
I understand that a mixed-race child at that time would have been a challenging issue for the couple under any circumstances, but if I were grant Munro I would have serious doubts about a wife who would have hidden this secret from me, particularly once she decided to bring the child back. So at the end I am more impressed with the husband than the wife in this story.
I felt quite touched by this one, and also remembered it vividly from childhood though I don't believe it was ever filmed.ACD is often quite bad (well, quite Victorian) on racial issues so it was a pleasure to find this one relatively unproblematic. I agree with Frances that the wife doesn't always behave well (or consistently!) but we aren't aware of the kind of discrimination she faced in a mixed-race partnership.
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I think that the child being in close proximity was the reason she couldn't stay away, making up for lost time.
I thought it was very selfish to leave the child behind, but it was made up by the kindness and understanding of her new husband, I don’t usually like happy ever afters, but I found this tail rather touching.
This was all about the wife’s insecurities, and possible mental frailty after the shocking loss of her first husband who she obviously loved dearly. After standing up to the bigots and racists who would have condemned her for marrying her first husband, her confidence would have been knocked severely being left alone with his child.Putting off the revelation of the child being alive to her new husband only made things worse for her and in that way she dug herself into a hole which she could not get out of.
Making the child wear a mask was cruel and probably damaging to the little girl because it obviously couldn’t be seen as a game when it went on day after day.
The reaction of the new husband revealed how much he loved his wife, even though she had been at fault in not revealing sooner that she had a child.
Holmes did have the option to consider that the child was still alive rather than the husband, but he chose to ignore it, probably because the facts didn’t point towards a child. However, I was surprised that a woman was in the cottage when the husband came to call, but I suppose Holmes considered her to be a maid or housekeeper.
This story was really captivating. I can't wonder how it was received at the time, but I was very moved when the husband get the girl and put her on his arm.
The Adventure of the Yellow Face (The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes)
Availability The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/834
Background Information
"The Adventure of the Yellow Face", one of the 56 short Sherlock Holmes stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is the third tale from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. It was first published in The Strand Magazine in the United Kingdom in February 1893, and in Harper's Weekly in the United States on February 11, 1893.
One of Doyle's sentimental pieces, the story is remarkable in that Holmes' deduction during the course of it proves incorrect. According to Dr. Watson:
...where he failed it happened too often that no one else succeeded... Now and again, however, it chanced that even when he erred the truth was still discovered.
Publication History
"The Adventure of the Yellow Face" was published in the UK in The Strand Magazine in February 1893, and in the US in Harper's Weekly on February 11, 1893. It was also published in the US edition of The Strand Magazine in March 1893. The story was published with seven illustrations by Sidney Paget in the Strand, and with two illustrations by W. H. Hyde in Harper's Weekly. It was included in the short story collection The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, which was published in December 1893 in the UK and February 1894 in the US.
A Short Review
In most of the previous Sherlock Holmes stories, the detective had always reached the right conclusion, even if, on occasion, he had been too late. "The Adventure of the Yellow Face," though, showed how Holmes’ deductions could be wrong.
The story shows how Holmes can deduce everything he needs to know about the owner of a left-behind pipe, but provided with evidence from a client, even Holmes could arrive at the wrong conclusion.
There is no great complexity to "The Adventure of the Yellow Face," and in the end, the solution is quite simple, although the solution does provide insight into racial and social stigma in the Victorian era, something which has not totally disappeared even today.
The ending of the story has a “feel good feeling” to it, although "The Adventure of the Yellow Face" is a story from the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle canon that is often overlooked; it is one of the stories not adapted by Granada for their Sherlock Holmes series with Jeremy Brett.
"The Adventure of the Yellow Face" does provide a close link between the works of Conan Doyle and the works of Agatha Christie. Sherlock Holmes asks Watson to mention Norbury whenever Holmes comes across as being too arrogant during a case, whilst Poirot asks Hastings to remind him of the “chocolate box." In the case of Poirot, though, it was a reprimand that was soon ignored.
Treatment of Race
Doyle's sympathetic treatment of interracial marriage, between an Englishwoman and a black lawyer in Atlanta, Georgia, appears extraordinarily liberal for the 1890s. Though the story has the widow treating her dead husband's race as a secret whose revelation might entail negative reactions, the marriage is not illegal in Britain, and her second husband's loving response is reported approvingly by Watson. This story, however, should be set alongside Doyle's stereotyped caricature of a thuggish black boxer, in "The Adventure of the Three Gables" (1926).