Author
Baroness Orczy
1865-1947
Hungarian-born British novelist and playwright who created the Scarlet Pimpernel, a wealthy English fop who secretly rescues French aristocrats from the guillotine during the Revolution.
Born Baroness Emma Magdolna Rozália Mária Jozefa Borbála Orczy de Orci.
Emma Orczy was born on 23 September 1865 in Tarnaörs, Hungary, the daughter of a composer, Baron Félix Orczy de Orci. Her parents left their estate in 1868, and the family lived in Budapest, Brussels and Paris before settling in London in 1880. At art school she met the illustrator Montagu Barstow, a clergyman's son, and they married in 1894.
Short of money, she worked with her husband as a translator and illustrator, and began writing after their son was born in 1899. Her first novel failed, but detective stories in the Royal Magazine found a small following. In 1903 she and her husband wrote a play, The Scarlet Pimpernel, based on one of her short stories. It opened in the West End in 1905 and passed 2,000 performances, bringing huge sales for her novel of the same name.
The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905) follows Sir Percy Blakeney, who hides behind the public face of a slow-thinking, foppish playboy while leading a band of supporters who rescue French aristocrats from the Revolution. His disguises, his quick wits and the scarlet pimpernel he leaves as a calling card set out conventions later used for superheroes. She wrote over a dozen sequels and many detective stories, and was a founding member of the Detection Club.
During the First World War she founded the Women of England's Active Service League, which urged women to persuade men to enlist. She spent the Second World War in Monte Carlo, where her husband died in 1942, and died in Henley-on-Thames in 1947.
Sources: wikipedia.org
