Background

The Baroness Emma Magdolna Rozalia Maria Jozefa Borbala Emmuska Orczy de Orci or Emmuska as she was called, was born on September 23, 1865 in Hungary. Three years after her birth her parents composer Baron Felix Orczy de Orci and Countess Emma Wass de Szentegyed et Cage left their estate in Budapest because they feared a revolution by the peasants. They relocated to Brussels and then Paris.

Education

Unlike many aristocratic women, Orczy wanted to pursue higher education, but her father rejected her plea to go to Cambridge. In Paris, Emmuska studied music until 1880 but was not very successful. When she was fourteen, her family relocated to London. There she attended the West London School of Art and the Heatherley's School of Fine Art. Although some of her paintings are on display at the Royal Academy in London Emmuska was not destined to become a painter.

Career

To earn some money when her child was a baby, Emma Orczy began writing small detective stories for the Royal Magazine. Together with the husband, Emma Orczy began to produce book and magazine illustrations and published an edition of Hungarian folktales. Her first attempt at a novel, a spy thriller, was published under the title The Emperor's Candlesticks (1899). Orczy's early detective stories appeared in The Royal Magazine and collected in The Case of Miss Elliot (1905). Her interest in this kind of fiction was prompted by suspense dramas and a real-life crime: the body of a dead woman was found in front of their house. The victim was purported to have been killed by "Jack the Ripper", who had terrorized London in the Whitechapel area in 1888.

Orczy became famous in 1903 with the stage version of the Scarlet Pimpernel, which ran for four years. It was written with her husband – he co-authored two other plays, The Sin of William Jackson (1906), produced in London, and Beau Brocade (1908), which was based on Orczy's novel. The dramatized version of Pimpernel, starring Fred Terry and Julia Neilson, premiered at Nottingham's Theatre Royal, and was given a London run in 1905 at the New Theatre.

More than a dozen publishers rejected the book adaptation of The Scarlet Pimpernel. Orczy's novel had as its background the French Revolution, as in Dickens's novel A Tale of Two Cities. Sir Percy Blakeney is a mysterious hero, who saves the lives of the French aristocrats and helps them to escape the guillotine. Orczy's swashbuckling hero influenced Johnston McCulley's Zorro, whose first adventure, 'The Curse of Capistrano', appeared in 1919 in the pulp magazine All-Story Weekly. The bestselling book inspired several film versions, the best of which was The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934). It was directed by the American Harold Young, starring Leslie Howard (Sir Percy), and Merle Oberon (Marguerite), his wife.

Ideologically less committed, Orczy's mysteries attracted more critical interest in the United States than her historical adventures. Her best-known detective character was the Old Man in the Corner, who solved crimes in thirty-eight stories, without leaving his chair, like professor Van Dusen or later Nero Wolfe. Although The Old Man does not hide his upper-class attitudes, he sometimes feels sympathy for the criminals, perhaps because in the final story of the first series he is revealed as a murderer himself.

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 included disguises. Between the years 1905 and 1928 Orczy published 13 collections of short stories about the Old Man in the Corner and Lady Molly Robertson-Kirk of Scotland Yard. Elvi Hale played Lady Molly in the episode 'The Woman in the Big Hat' (1971) of The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes.

In the late 1910s Baroness Orczy and her husband moved to Monte Carlo, where they stayed during the Nazi occupation; the SS headquarters were in the Hôtel de Paris, opposite the Casino. In the film Pimpernel Smith (1941), directed by Leslie Howard, a Cambridge archeologist named Horatio Smith rescues Jews from Nazi concentration camps. After World War II Orczy spent her remaining years in England, which she described as her spiritual home. A prolific writer, she worked actively until her eighties and finished her autobiography, Links in the Chain of Life (1947) before her death. Baroness Orczy died in London, on November 12, 1947.

Achievements

• Baroness Emmuska Orczy is chiefly remembered as author of The Scarlet Pimpernel, one of the greatest popular successes of the 20th century. Her stories of the Scarlet Pimpernel were a great success and led to play being produced in London's West End and a series of novels.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Old Man in the Corner

    (The Old Man In the Corner was one of the earliest armchai...)

    1909
  • I Will Repay

    (The second Pimpernel book written by Orczy, it comes chro...)

    1906
  • The Elusive Pimpernel

    (First published in 1908, The Elusive Pimpernel by Barones...)

    1908
  • A Bride of the Plains

    (A Bride of the Plains is a historical novel written in 19...)

    1915
  • The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel

    (The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel is a sequel book to t...)

    1919
  • El Dorado

    (Eldorado, by Baroness Orczy is a sequel book to the class...)

    1913
  • The Laughing Cavalier: The Story Of The Ancestor Of The Scarlet Pimpernel

    (In March 1623, the Dutch nobleman Willem van Oldenbarneve...)

    1914
  • A True Woman

    (Luke de Mountford, heir to his uncle Lord Radcliffe, asks...)

    1911
  • Sir Percy Leads the Band

    (This sequel novel, set in January and February 1793, foll...)

    1936
  • A Child of the Revolution

    (A Child of the Revolution is the last book in the Scarlet...)

    1932
  • Lord Tony's Wife

    (Sir Percy Blakeney and his lady had just arrived. It was ...)

    1917
  • Nicolette: a tale of old Provence 1922
  • Castles in the Air 1921
  • The Heart of a Woman

Politics

Some of Orczy's friends in Monte Carlo admired Mussolini, but Orczy herself, like most of the liberal-minded English residents, did not feel any sympathy toward the Fascist régime. Orczy believed strongly in an imperialist government and the aristocracy. She also had a strong opposition to the Soviet Union.

Views

Throughout her life, Orczy held strongly conservative views. Orczy's novels were racy, mannered melodramas and she favoured historical fiction. She took her subjects from history because modern life and modern ideas bored her. She hated modern art with its "naked ladies with green thighs and faces like acidulated pumpkins." She believed in gallantry and chivalry. She believed in heroes.

Quotations: "The Englishman lives like a king and eats like a pig, and the Hungarian lives like a pig, but God knows he eats like a king."

“The weariest nights, the longest days, sooner or later must perforce come to an end.”

Membership

Orczy organized a group of Women of England's Active Service League. The main duty of the League was for women to convince every man of their acquaintance to join the military. In it's heyday, the group consisted of over twenty thousand women.

Personality

From the start, Emma Orczy was a romantic. When she and her sister played, Emmuska would always be the dashing prince come to save the damsel in distress. She always wanted to be the hero.

Connections

While at art school Emma Orczy met her future husband, Montague Maclean Barstow. He was the son of an English clergyman, and the two had been very happily married for almost fifty years. They had one son, John Montague Orczy - Barstow who is believed to have written The Life and Exploits of the Scarlet Pimpernel a biography of the fictional Scarlet Pimpernel created by his mother. After her husband died in 1942, Orczy moved back to London, where she stayed the rest of her life.

Father:

Baron Felix Orczy de Orci

Mother:

Countess Emma Wass de Szentegyed et Cage

late-spouse:

Henry George Montagu MacLean Barstow

Son:

John Montague Orczy-Barstow

Sister:

Madeleine Orczy de Orci

Grandfather:

Baron László Orczy

grandmother:

Baroness Magdolna Müller

Grandfather:

Count Sámuel Wass de Szentegyed et Cege

grandmother:

Rozália Eperjessy de Károlyfejérvár