Baroness
Orczy
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I am a fan of Baroness Orczy, who is remembered
for her novels about Sir Percy Blakeney, baronet, aka the Scarlet Pimpernel.
Curious about her life and times I wrote this blog, which I hope you will
enjoy.
Baroness Orczy was born in Tarna Ors,
Hungary, on September twenty-third, eighteen hundred and sixty-five to Countess
Emma Wass and her husband Baron Felix Orczy. Her parents frequented the
magnificent court of the Austrian Hungarian Empire where the baron was well
known as a composer, conductor, and friend of famous composers, among others,
Liszt, and Wagner.
Until the age of five, when a mob of peasants
fired the barn, stables and fields destroying the crops, Emma Magdolna Rozália
Mária Jozefa Borbála “Emmuska” Orczy, enjoyed luxury in her father’s magnificent,
ancestral chateau. Later she described it as a rambling farmhouse on the banks
of the River Tarna. She and her family lived there in magnificent ‘medieval
style.’ Throughout her life the
exuberant parties, the dancing and the haunting gypsy music lived on in her
memory.
After leaving Tarna Ors forever, the Orczys went
to Budapest. Subsequently, afraid of a national uprising, the baron moved his
family from Hungary to Belgium.
Emmuska attended convent schools in Brussels and
Paris until eighteen hundred and eighty when her the baron settled his family
in Wimpole Street, London.
In six
months, fifteen-year-old Emmuska learned English for which she won a special
prize. Afterward, she attended the West London School of Art and then
Heatherby’s School of Art. Baron Orczy tried hard to develop his daughter’s
musical talent, but Emmuska chose art, and had the satisfaction of her work
being exhibited at The Royal Academy. Subsequently, she became an author.
She fell in love with England and regarded it as
her spiritual birthplace, her true home. When people referred to her as a
foreigner, she said there was nothing English about her, and that her love was
all English, for she loved the country
In eighteen hundred and ninety-four Emmuska
married Montague Barstow, an illustrator, whom she met had net at Heatherby’s.
In her own words, their marriage was happy and joyful.
The newlyweds enjoyed opera, art exhibitions,
concerts, and the theatre.
Emmuska’s bridegroom encouraged her to write. In
eighteen hundred and ninety-five her translations of Old Hungarian Fairy Tales:
The Enchanted Cat, Fairyland’s Beauty, and Uletka and The White Lizard, edited
with Montague’s help, were published.
Inspired by thrillers she watched on stage,
Emmuska wrote mystery and detective stories. The first featured The Old Man in
the Corner. For the generous payment of sixty pounds the Royal Magazine
published it in 1901. Her stories were an instant hit. Yet, although the public
could not get enough of them, she remained dissatisfied.
In her autobiography Emmuska wrote, I felt inside
my heart a kind of stirring that the writing of sensational stuff for magazines
would not and should not, be the end and aim of my ambition. I wanted to do
something more than that. Something big.
Montague and Emmuska spent nineteen hundred in
Paris that, in her ears, echoed with the violence of the French Revolution.
Surely, she had found the setting for a magnificent hero to champion the
victims of “The Terror.” Unexpectedly, after she and her husband returned to
England, while waiting for a train, Emmuska saw her most famous hero, Sir
Percival Blakeney, dressed in exquisite clothes. She noted the monocle held up
in his slender hand, heard his lazy drawl, and quaint laugh. Emmuska told her
husband about the incident. In five weeks, she wrote The Scarlet Pimpernel.
More than a dozen publishers rejected it. They wanted modern, true-life novels.
Undeterred Emmuska and Montague turned the novel into a play. The critics did
not care for it when it opened at the New Theatre, London in nineteen hundred
and four, but the audiences loved it, and it ran for two thousand performances.
The Scarlet Pimpernel was published and became the blockbuster of its era
making it possible for Emmuska and Montague to live in an estate in Kent, have
a bustling London home and buy a luxurious villa in Monte Carlo.
During the next thirty five years, Emmuska wrote
sequels, among which are Lord Tony’s Wife, in nineteen hundred and seventeen,
The League of The Scarlet Pimpernel in nineteen hundred and nineteen, and other
historical and crime novels. Her loyal fans repaid her by flocking to the first
of several films about her gallant hero. Released in nineteen hundred and
thirty-five, it was produced by her compatriot, Alexander Korda, starred Lesley
Howard as Percy, and Merle Oberon as Marguerite.
Emmuska and
Montague moved to Monte Carlo in the late nineteen hundred and tens where they
remained during the Nazi occupation during the Second World War.
Montague died in nineteen hundred and forty-three
leaving Emmuska bereft. She lived with her only son and divided her time
between London and Monte Carlo. Her last novel Will-O’theWisp and her
autobiography, Links in the Chain of Life were both published in nineteen
hundred and forty-seven shortly before her death at the age of eight-two on
November the twelfth, in the same year.
A lasting tribute to the baroness is the enduring
affection the public still has for her brave, romantic hero, Sir Percival
Blakeney, master of disguise.
