She casually insulted other women in order to differentiate herself from them. That is all fine and good, but she also possessed the air of a woman who thought she was superior to other members of her sex. She was an unconventionally educated high society lady with aspirations of making breakthroughs in the field of physics, and was not above breaking any and all restrictive Victorian gender norms in order do it.
We also get another point-of-view character in Grace Carrrow who I must say was designed in a lab with the specific goal of irking me. The Watchmaker of Filigree Street (2015) by Natasha Pulley
A game is afoot, but Thaniel hadn’t the slightest clue what game it is. One day, he returned to his threadbare apartment to find that someone had broken in but instead of taking anything, the mysterious intruder had left a rosy gold pocket watch of exquisite workmanship as a gift for him (and also did his dishes to boot). Thaniel Steepleton is our Watson: a telegraphist who was working for the Home Office when the Fenian dynamite campaign orchestrated by Irish republicans was well underway in the late 19th century. In lieu of the Baker Street sleuth, we get an equally eccentric Japanese horologist from Filigree Street who is arguably as interesting a figure as Sherlock Holmes himself, though in a very different way. The Watchmaker of Filigree Street has all the ingredients of a hit: it is a very unconventional detective story set in London in the Victorian era but it is also a work of science fiction or fantasy, question mark? And in spite of its Holmesian set up, there is no detective character in it. I assume it must have cost extra to punch that peephole in all the hardback covers, and I can see why they did it. Bloomsbury Circus must have had a surfeit of confidence in Ms Pulley’s debut novel to make such a handsome volume out of it.
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