Lord Tony’s Wife

Lord Tony’s Wife came out in 1917 and is one of the more focused entries in the Pimpernel sequence. The Lord Tony of the title is Lord Anthony Dewhurst, one of the original League of the Scarlet Pimpernel, the small band of English aristocrats who assist Sir Percy on his rescue missions into Revolutionary France. The book centers on Tony’s elopement with Yvonne, a young French aristocrat, and their attempts to work through the dangers of the Brittany countryside during the Vendée counter-revolution.

The novel takes the action away from Paris and into the rural west of France, where the royalist Vendéean uprising against the Republic was at its most chaotic in 1793. Orczy uses the historical setting more carefully here than in some of the earlier books. The Pimpernel and Marguerite appear as supporting figures rather than leads, which gives the secondary characters room to breathe. Worth reading after the main novels for completists who want the wider League world.