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

Emma Magdalena Rosalia Maria Josefa Barbara Orczy (1865-1947) wrote under the name Baroness Orczy. Born in Tarna-Ors, Hungary, she was the only daughter of Baron Felix Orczy, a composer and conductor, and his wife, Emma. Orczy moved with her parents from Budapest to Brussels to Paris and then to London, where she learned to speak English. She was educated at West London School of Art. Orczy’s first detective stories appeared in magazines, but she gained fame in 1903 with the stage version of The Scarlet Pimpernel. In the late 1910s, Orczy and her husband moved to Monte Carlo, where they stayed during the Nazi occupation. Her husband died in 1943, and after World War II, she spent her remaining years in England.

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

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