Watsons wife’s death?

[Crazycatsthebest]

Hey!

im just reading ‘the return of Sherlock Holmes’ and in ‘the adventures of the empty house’ and its very heavily implied that watsons wife died? I get the vibe that Conan Doyle basically wanted to reset the canon and move Watson and Holmes’s back in together and ditch Mrs Watson and the practice. I’m just wondering if her death ever comes up again basically, whilst reading I keep thinking about if either of them is going to bring it up, but they haven’t yet. I suppose the in universe explanation is that Watson publishes these telling so wouldn’t want to put to much of his personal life into them?

[Carol the Dabbler]

Hi there, Crazycat, and welcome to Sherlock Forum!    

My own best guess regarding why Holmes made that comment in "Empty House" is that when ACD submitted the story to his publisher, he had totally forgotten that Watson was married (presumably because, as you point out, the stories always focussed on Holmes & Watson).  So the publisher said wait a minute, you can't just have Watson moving back in with Holmes -- what about Mrs. Watson?!  At which point ACD stuck in that one reference to Watson's bereavement (and promptly forgot about it, I suspect).

The late Mrs. Watson was apparently the female client from "Sign of the Four," who became engaged to Watson by the end of that story.  Been a while since I read any of the original Holmes stories, so the only other reference to a wife that I recall just offhand is the one who addresses him as "James" at the beginning of "Man with the Twisted Lip" -- do you recall whether that was before or after "Empty House"?

 

[Crazycatsthebest]

16 hours ago, Carol the Dabbler said:

Hi there, Crazycat, and welcome to Sherlock Forum!    

My own best guess regarding why Holmes made that comment in "Empty House" is that when ACD submitted the story to his publisher, he had totally forgotten that Watson was married (presumably because, as you point out, the stories always focussed on Holmes & Watson).  So the publisher said wait a minute, you can't just have Watson moving back in with Holmes -- what about Mrs. Watson?!  At which point ACD stuck in that one reference to Watson's bereavement (and promptly forgot about it, I suspect).

The late Mrs. Watson was apparently the female client from "Sign of the Four," who became engaged to Watson by the end of that story.  Been a while since I read any of the original Holmes stories, so the only other reference to a wife that I recall just offhand is the one who addresses him as "James" at the beginning of "Man with the Twisted Lip" -- do you recall whether that was before or after "Empty House"?

 

Hey, thanks for the reply, yeah I thought he probably just wanted them back together and wrote her and the practice out real quick lol.

Watsons wife is I think called Mary? Or something like that I’m pretty sure, she lives in the house where the crime happened in the sign of four and Watson fell in love with her I think. I can’t really remember, sign of four was the first Sherlock story I read quite a few years ago but I didn’t like it so I never really read the others until I decided to give it another go last year, and I really like them, I skipped over sign of four when I restarted though.

yeah I remember the James thing and thinking it was weird but maybe just a nickname for John, twisted lip was in adventures of Sherlock holmes I’m pretty sure, if not it was memoirs, so before empty house.

i think Conan Doyle definitely can write interesting female characters, i liked the woman from the yellow face, the girl from study in scarlet, the lady who beat Sherlock in the one about the king, and I thought the girl and the story about the couple who made the woman they employed look like there daughter whilst keeping their daughter locked up. But I don’t think he was very interested in Mrs Watson I suppose.

[Carol the Dabbler]

On 3/9/2026 at 2:41 PM, Crazycatsthebest said:

Watsons wife is I think called Mary?

Presumably -- assuming she's the female client (Mary Morstan) in "Sign of the Four."

On 3/9/2026 at 2:41 PM, Crazycatsthebest said:

I remember the James thing and thinking it was weird but maybe just a nickname for John,

Or maybe she was simply absent-minded (like ACD).  Dorothy Sayers (who wrote the Lord Peter Wimsey stories) had an interesting explanation:  Although Watson's middle name is never divulged, the initial is "H" -- which she conjectured stands for Hamish, which is the Scottish equivalent of James.  So maybe Mary didn't like the name John, but she thought it was silly for an English man to have a Scottish name, so she just translated it.

On 3/9/2026 at 2:41 PM, Crazycatsthebest said:

i think Conan Doyle definitely can write interesting female characters

Now that you mention it, I agree.  He does *not* seem to assume (as Holmes often does assume) that women are ipso facto ignorant and illogical -- nor does he write women as just like men except for the obvious.  His female characters are generally quite believable individuals.  Maybe that comes from his years as a physician and/or from his acquaintance with Dr. Joseph Bell, the med-school professor whose astute observations inspired ACD to invent Holmes.

I, too, like the women you mentioned and the stories they were in (with the last two being "Scandal in Bohemia" and "Copper Beeches").