Irene Adler is best known as the clever opera singer who outsmarted Sherlock Holmes in "A Scandal in Bohemia," a short story that came out in 1891. She only appears in that one tale, yet she's become one of the most memorable characters in the entire Holmes canon—partly because Holmes himself was genuinely impressed by her intelligence and nerve.
What's interesting is how different modern adaptations treat her compared to Doyle's original. In the stories, Holmes admires her purely for her wit and cunning; there's nothing romantic about it. But in later versions—TV shows, movies, fan works—she's constantly reimagined as a potential love interest, which wasn't really Doyle's angle at all. That shift says a lot about how people want to read the Holmes mythos differently than it was written.
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