Discovered an aspie character in a 1945 novel

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Recently, I read "A Letter To Five Wives," a novel which was the source material for the 1949 golden-age classic "A Letter To Three Wives" It was one of those rare instances in which the film was better than the novel (director and writer Joseph Mankiewicz gave the characters some dimension and life, while in the book they were pretty flat and helpless) Regardless though...

In the book, one of the wives named Deborah seems to display a lot of Asperger traits - blunt, pretty honest and matter of fact, stuck to a routine, not all that interested in "girly stuff," resists efforts from her husband to make her over into a more glamorous archetype like the book's female villain (who the wives have a contemptuousness relationship with, and to get back at them, she coolly informs them that she left town with one of their husbands) Intentional or not, it would be pretty groundbreaking stuff to create an "aspergirl" in a time when Autism was basically unknown.

The book itself though, is long out of print and thus difficult to find (a decent-sized public library system might have a copy) but if one can find a copy, it's worth checking out.

Thank you.

I don't see why that would be groundbreaking. Don't get me wrong, it's cool that you found it and shared it, but after all Hans Asperger didn't invent aspies, he just defined the condition. I would think that it would be about as many "aspergirls" several thousand years ago as now.

From what I've heard Sherlock holmes was based on George Boole, creator of computer science. Aspies have been around for a long time. Back in the day people with the free time to write and do science often moved in the same circles.

I've read more about Holmes than you would probably believe, and I've never heard this before. Arthur Conan Doyle based Holmes on his former mentor, a doctor named Joseph Bell. He was able to diagnose his patients before they spoke a single word to him, and he could tell them all other sorts of facts about their lives just by looking at them – their careers, how many siblings they had, what they had for breakfast, etc. Doyle also based Holmes in part on himself – in real life, he assisted the police, using Bell's methods, and got innocent people out of jail.

Based on everything I've read about Doyle and Bell, neither of them are likely to have been an Aspie – Doyle's personality was much closer to Dr. Watson than to Holmes – but it's true that Aspies existed back then. It's just that nobody knew what to call them. The more severely autistic people found themselves in mental asylums for life.