In “A Scandal in Bohemia,” the woman who outwits Sherlock Holmes is Irene Adler.
Irene Adler is introduced in the story first published in 1891 and later collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. She is a retired American opera singer who possesses a compromising photograph involving the King of Bohemia. The king hires Holmes to recover it before his planned marriage.
Holmes disguises himself as a clergyman and stages a false emergency to discover where Adler keeps the photograph. She notices the deception, observes Holmes’s reaction to a thrown smoke bomb, and leaves Britain before he can return. Holmes finds only a farewell note and a portrait of Adler; she has taken the photograph with her.
Watson says Holmes refers to her as “the woman,” but the story does not present her as Holmes’s romantic partner. Adler appears in only this original story, although later books, films, television series, and radio productions expand her role. Mary Morstan and Violet Hunter are different women from other Holmes stories.