The Scarlet Pimpernel

“Arguably the best adventure story ever published and certainly the most influential that appeared during the early decades of the twentieth century.”—Gary Hoppenstand

Baroness Orczy (1865-1947)

Emma Magdalena Rosalia Maria Josefa Barbara Orczy, who wrote under the name Baroness Orczy, was born in Tarna-Ors, Hungary. The only child of Baron Felix Orczy, a composer and conductor, and his wife Emma, Orczy’s family relocated from Budapest to Brussels, then to Paris, and finally to London. She learned English at the age of fifteen and was educated at the West London School of Art.

Orczy’s early detective stories were published in magazines. However, she achieved widespread fame as a writer in 1903 with the stage adaptation of The Scarlet Pimpernel. In the late 1910s, Orczy and her husband moved to Monte Carlo, where they resided during the Nazi occupation. Her husband passed away in 1943. Following World War II, she spent the remainder of her life in England.

Gary Hoppenstand is a professor in the Department of American Thought and Language at Michigan State University. He has authored numerous books and articles covering subjects from nineteenth-century British and American literature to film studies. Hoppenstand has been nominated twice for the World Fantasy Award and is the recipient of the Popular Culture Association’s National Book Award for his textbook, Popular Fiction: An Anthology. He has contributed to a Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition of P.C. Wren’s Beau Geste and published a Penguin Classics omnibus edition of Anthony Hope’s novels The Prisoner of Zenda and Rupert of Hentzau.

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