Baroness Orczy Biography and List of Works

Hungarian-British novelist, best remembered as the author of THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL (1905). Baroness Orczy's sequels to the novel were less successful. She was also an artist whose works were exhibited at the Royal Academy, London. Her first ventures into fiction were crime stories. Among her most popular characters was The Old Man in the Corner, who was featured in a series of twelve British movies from 1924, starring Rolf Leslie.

"They seek him here, they seek him there.
Those Frenchmen seek him everywhere.
Is he in Heaven? - Is he in hell?
That damned annoying Pimpernel."
(from The Scarlet Pimpernel)

Orczy was born in Tarna-Ors, Hungary, as the only daughter of Baron Felix Orczy, a noted composer and conductor, and his wife Emma. Her father was a friend of such composers as Wagner, Liszt, and Gounod. Orczy moved with her parents from Budapest to Brussels and then to London, learning to speak English at the age fifteen. She was educated in convent schools in Brussels and Paris. In London she studied at the West London School of Art. In 1894 Orczy married Montaque Barstow, whom she had met while studying at the Heatherby School of Art. Together they earned a living illustrating books and magazines, and jointly published an edition of Hungarian folktales.

Orczy's first detective stories appeared in magazines. As a writer she gained fame in 1903 with the stage version of the Scarlet Pimpernel. It was written with her husband - he co-authored two other plays, THE SIN OF WILLIAM JACKSON (1906), produced in London, and BEAU BROCADE, produced in 1908 and based on Orczy's novel. The dramatized version of Pimpernel, starring Fred Terry and Julia Neilson, was produced in Nottingham and finally given a London run in 1905.

More than a dozen publishers rejected the book adaptation of The Scarlet Pimpernel. Orzcy's best-selling novel has as its background the French Revolution. Sir Percy Blakeney is a mysterious hero who saves innocents, usually aristocrats, from 'Mam'zelle Guillotine.' He falls in love with a beautiful actress, Marguerite St Just. To conceal from Marguerite and others that he is the Scarlet Pimpernel, Sir Percy assumes the role of a poetry-reciting, inept fop. The book has inspired several film version, the best of which was directed in 1934 by Harold Young, starring Leslie Howard (Sir Percy) and Merle Oberon (Marguerite), his wife. Marguerite is fooled by Percy's act and to save her imprisoned brother she agrees to help the villainous Frenchman Chauvelin (Raymond Massey) to trap the Pimpernel. The original director Roland V. Brown was fired on his first day at work, (one of many times in his odd career.) Howard and Oberon became lovers while filming, causing her to break off her engagement to Joseph Schenk, the head of United Artists. She was later to marry the producer, Alexander Korda.

"Have you ever heard of the Scarlet Pimpernel, Citoyenne St. Just?" asked Chauvelin, abruptly.
"Heard of the Scarlet Pimpernel?" she retorted with a long and merry laugh, "Faith man! we talk of nothing else. . . . We have hats 'a la Scarlet Pimpernel'; our horses are called `Scarlet Pimpernel'; at the Prince of Wales' supper party the other night we had a `soufflé a la Scarlet Pimpernel.'. . .Lud!" she added gaily, "the other day I ordered at my milliner's a blue dress trimmed with green, and bless me, if she did not call that `a la Scarlet Pimpernel.'"

Orzcy's first collection of mystery stories appeared in 1905 under the title THE CASE OF MISS ELLIOT. Among Orczy's detective characters is the Old Man in the Corner, who solves mysteries in thirty-eight stories without leaving his chair. The first collection of the Old Man stories, THE CASE OF MISS ELLIOTT, was published in 1905. This nondescript fellow spent much of his life in the corner of a London teashop. A young reporter brings him details of crimes that baffle the police. The Old Man does not only solve his crimes by pure intellect alone, and often ends feeling sympathetic towards the criminals he has brought to justice - in spite of his upper class attitudes. He appeared in the 1970s in the Thames TV series The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, when the case of 'The Mysterious Death on the Underground Railway' was dramatized. The lawyer Patrick Mulligan is the hero of 12 stories in SKIN O' MY TOOTH (1928). M. Hector Ratichon, a highly unscrupulous "volunteer police agent" in the Paris of 1813, is the hero of CASTLES IN THE AIR (1921) and seven other cases.

"'Exactly,' he said, while he leant forward excitedly, for all the world like a Jack-in-the-box let loose. 'Precisely; and you are a journalist - call yourself one, at least - and it should be part of your business to notice and describe people. I don't mean only the wonderful personage with the clear Saxon features, the fine blue eyes, the noble brow and classic face, but the ordinary person - the person who represents ninety out of every hundred of his own kind - the average Englishman, say, of the middle classes, who is neither very tall nor very short, who wears a moustache which is neither fair nor dark, but which masks his mouth, and a top hat which hides the shape of his head and brow, a man, in fact, who dresses like hundreds of his fellow-creatures, moves like them, speaks like them, has no peculiarity.'"
(from 'The Mysterious Death on the Underground Railway')

Orczy's attempt to create a female aristocratic hero, Lady Molly Robertson-Kirk, from the 'Female Department of Scotland Yard', was not so successful. She solved 12 cases in LADY MOLLY OF SCOTLAND YARD (1910). Lady Molly's methods of solving crimes include disguises. Romantically she secures the release of her spouse from unjust imprisonment. Between the years 1905 and 1928 Orczy published 13 collections of short stories about the Old Man in the Corner, Lady Molly, Bill Owen, and other characters.

In the late 1910s Baroness Orczy and her husband moved to Monte Carlo, where they stayed during the Nazi occupation. Her husband died in 1942 and after World War II she spent her remaining years in England. Orzcy was a prolific writer and worked actively until her eighties. Her autobiography, LINKS IN THE CHAIN OF LIFE, was published in 1947. She died in London, on November 12, 1947.

Scarlet Pimpernel - set in the times of French Revolution. Sir Percy Blakeney, who plays the double role of a clumsy English aristocrat, and swashbuckling hero, the master of disguise. He works as a spy, saving the lives the French aristocrats and helping them to escape the guillotine. The persecutor of the Scarlet Pimpernell is Citizen Chauvelin, an agent of Robespierre. Orzcy's sympathies were shown clearly: she was suspicious of the "lower orders" and Pimpernel rescued the French nobility - sometimes others - only because he admired the nobility from all countries. He also formed a band of helpers, Sir Andrew Ffoulkes, Lord Anthony Dewhurst, Lord Hastings, etc.

For further reading: World Authors 1900-1950, ed. by Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmens (1996); Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers, ed. by J.M. Reilly (1985); Twentieth Century Romance and Historical Writers, ed. by Aruna Vasudevan (1994)

ed. and trans.: OLD HUNGARIAN FAIRY TALES, (1895)