Baroness Emmuska Orczy

Emmuska Orczy was born in Tarnaörs, Hungary, in 1865. Her family left Hungary while she was young and eventually settled in London, where she studied art. She exhibited paintings at the Royal Academy and began publishing short stories in the 1890s. Her marriage to Montague Barstow brought writing and theatre together: the two collaborated on the stage version of The Scarlet Pimpernel, which opened in London in 1903. Orczy then developed the story as a novel, published in 1905, introducing Sir Percy Blakeney and the secret rescues carried out during the French Revolution.

The Pimpernel became a continuing series, but Orczy also wrote historical romances, plays, memoirs and detective fiction. Her stories about the Old Man in the Corner use a different device: a seated observer solves crimes by reasoning from newspaper reports and clues. That contrast shows the range of her work beyond the swashbuckling identity that made her most famous. She kept publishing well into the twentieth century and died in 1947. The National Portrait Gallery records her life as a Hungarian-born novelist and identifies both her artistic training and the major success of The Scarlet Pimpernel.