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The Scarlet Pimpernel

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First published: 1905
Pages: 237

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Read by Karen Savage · 7 h 49 min · 31 parts

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Paris: September, 1792
15:45
Dover: "The Fisherman's Rest"
18:18
The Refugees
14:10
The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel
15:05
Marguerite
10:45
An Exquisite of '92
18:44
The Secret Orchard
12:04
The Accredited Agent
21:42
The Outrage
11:56
In the Opera Box
27:09
Lord Grenville's Ball
11:32
The Scrap of Paper
15:24
Either - - Or?
4:47
One O'Clock Precisely
15:09
Doubt
10:10
Richmond
27:24
Farewell
12:56
The Mysterious Device
8:25
The Scarlet Pimpernel
16:56
The Friend
12:12
Suspense
14:31
Calais
17:34
Hope
12:26
The Death-Trap
12:38
The Eagle and the Fox
15:12
The Jew
15:43
On the Track
13:41
The Pere Blanchard's Hut
16:53
Trapped
9:01
The Schooner
21:45
The Escape
19:10

The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905) is a public domain work.

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About this book

Baroness Emmuska Orczy published The Scarlet Pimpernel in 1905, and the book essentially invented the secret-identity adventure-hero template that everything from Zorro to Batman would later borrow. The original idea came to Orczy on the Temple Underground platform in London, a fact she repeated enough times in interviews that it has become its own piece of literary mythology. She wrote the story first as a play with her husband, then as the novel, then as a serial.

The setting is France during the Reign of Terror in 1792. The aristocrats are being sent to the guillotine in batches. A mysterious English rescuer signs his work with a small red flower, the scarlet pimpernel, and slips condemned French nobles out of Paris under the noses of Citizen Chauvelin's secret police. The reader knows almost from the start that the rescuer is the apparently foolish English baronet Sir Percy Blakeney. The dramatic engine is his estranged wife Marguerite, French-born and once friends with revolutionary leaders, who is forced by Chauvelin to betray the Pimpernel without realizing she would be betraying her own husband. The plotting is melodramatic and very fast. The voice is breathless and quotable. A foundational text of popular adventure fiction.

Available edition: text of Project Gutenberg eBook #60. The PDF has 237 pages; the EPUB is reflowable. Project Gutenberg credits and license are kept.

About the author

Emmuska Orczy

Baroness Emma Magdalena Rozália Mária Jozefa Borbála Orczy de Orci, usually known as Baroness Orczy, was a Hungarian-born British novelist and playwright.

All 7 books by Emmuska Orczy