Baroness Orczy

Baroness Orczy (1865–1947), born Emma Magdalena Rozália Mária Jozefa Borbála Orczy de Orci, was a Hungarian-born novelist, playwright and artist who spent most of her adult life in Britain. Her family settled in London in 1880, where she studied art and exhibited at the Royal Academy before turning to writing. Her major breakthrough was The Scarlet Pimpernel, first successfully staged as a play and published as a novel in 1905. Its hero, Sir Percy Blakeney, disguises his intelligence behind the appearance of a foolish English aristocrat while secretly rescuing people threatened by the guillotine during the French Revolution. The character became one of popular fiction’s earliest heroes to operate through a concealed identity, anticipating later masked and double-life adventurers.

Orczy wrote numerous historical adventures distinguished by conspiracies, disguises, political intrigue, romance and daring escapes. More than a dozen Scarlet Pimpernel sequels and related stories expanded Sir Percy’s world, including I Will Repay, The Elusive Pimpernel, Eldorado, Lord Tony’s Wife and The Triumph of the Scarlet Pimpernel. Her historical fiction also moved beyond Revolutionary France: In Mary’s Reign concerns Tudor England, The Laughing Cavalier and Leatherface draw upon the history of the Netherlands, Unto Cæsar is set in imperial Rome, and The Bronze Eagle and A Spy of Napoleon explore the Napoleonic period. Although her treatment of history is strongly romantic and often sympathetic to aristocratic characters, her novels helped establish the fast-moving historical adventure as a major form of twentieth-century popular fiction.