Author: Emmuska Orczy

Baroness Emma Magdolna Rozália Mária Jozefa Borbála Orczy de Orci, generally known as Emmuska Orczy, was born in 1865 in Tarnaörs, Hungary, the daughter of a noble Hungarian composer-baron. The family fled Hungary in 1868 after a peasant revolt that destroyed much of their estate. Orczy spent her childhood in Budapest, Brussels, and Paris before moving to London in her teens. She studied painting in London, met her husband Montagu Barstow at art school, married him in 1894, and turned to writing partly to help with the family finances after his work as an illustrator slowed. The Scarlet Pimpernel began life as a play she co-wrote with her husband in 1903. The play struggled to find a producer at first. The novel version was published in 1905 and was a slow-burning success that built into a sustained popular phenomenon. Orczy wrote roughly a dozen Pimpernel novels and short story collections across the next thirty years, plus the Lady Molly of Scotland Yard detective stories, the Skin o' My Tooth lawyer stories, the historical novels Beau Brocade and By the Gods Beloved, and a steady stream of magazine fiction. Her politics were conservative and she was open about it. The Pimpernel novels are explicitly counter-revolutionary in their sympathies, treating Republican France with the same suspicion she would later extend to twentieth-century Communist movements. She and her husband moved to Monte Carlo in 1918 and stayed there for the rest of her life, except for a forced wartime stay in Hungary during the Second World War. She died in London in 1947. The Pimpernel franchise has long outlived her, with film and television adaptations appearing in every decade since the 1930s.