Orczy, Emma (1865–1947)

Hungarian-born English author . Name variations: Emmuska Orczy; Baroness Orczy. Born Emmuska Magdalena Rosalia Maria Josefa Barbara Orczy on September 23, 1865, in Tarna-Örs, Hungary; died on November 12, 1947, in London, England; daughter of Baron Felix Orczy (a gifted amateur composer) and Countess Emmuska Wass; married Montagu Barstow, in 1894 (died 1943); children: John Montagu Orczy Barstow (b. 1899).

Selected writings:

The Emperor's Candlesticks (1899); By the Gods Beloved (1905); The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905); The Tangled Skein (1907); The Old Man in the Corner (1908); Lady Molly of Scotland Yard (1910); Meadowsweet (1912); Unto Caesar (1914); The Old Scarecrow (1916); Silver-leg (1918); Castles in the Air (1921); The Honorable Jim (1924); The Celestial City (1926); Blue Eyes and Grey (1928); Skin o' My Tooth (1928); The Divine Folly (1937); Pride of Race (1942); Links in the Chain of Life (1947).

Born on September 23, 1865, in Tarna-Örs, Hungary, Emma Orczy, daughter of Countess Emmuska Wass and Baron Felix Orczy, was raised on the vast estates of her father. As a gifted amateur composer, Baron Orczy moved in a social circle that included the noted composers Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, Charles Gounod, and Jules Massenet. Orczy had fond memories of her childhood as part of Hungary's landed aristocracy, but the family left the country in 1868 after the baron's agricultural innovations caused an outburst of peasant violence against him. The family moved to Budapest, where Baron Orczy became Supreme Administrator of the National Theatre, and endeavored to create the finest operatic productions in Europe. During this time, Emma and her sister went to convent schools in Brussels and Paris. Emma first whetted her literary appetite for adventure and romance by writing and acting in plays which focused heavily on those two genres.

The Orczy family settled in London in the 1880s, when Emma was in her mid-teens. She spoke only Hungarian, French, and German, and devoted her first six months in London to learning English. Unlike many aristocratic women, Orczy wanted to pursue higher education, but her father rejected her plea to go to Cambridge. She initially studied music at schools in Brussels and Paris, but found greater success in her study of painting at the West London School of Art and at Heatherley's.

At Heatherley's, Orczy met Montagu Barstow, an illustrator, whom she later married. In collaboration with her husband, she began to translate and illustrate fairy tales, and wrote romance and adventure stories for the popular press. Her first novel, The Emperor's Candlesticks (1899), was a failure. However, her next venture, The Scarlet Pimpernel, was widely successful. Even though the book initially was rejected by 12 publishers, Orczy sparked interest in it through an adaptation produced in the autumn of 1903 at the Nottingham Theatre Royal, with Fred Terry in the leading role. The novel was finally published to coincide with the 1905 London production. The Scarlet Pimpernel (and its 12 sequels) tells the story of Sir Percy Blakeney, an English rescuer of French aristocrats during the French Revolution's Reign of Terror (1793–94). His rescues depend on a double identity: at home, he is known as a foppish, languid man of society, but as the daring Scarlet Pimpernel, he repeatedly risks death while saving those unjustly condemned in France. Readers and theater patrons alike adored the Blakeney character as the perfect figure of English manhood, and The Scarlet Pimpernel came to be known as a quintessentially English novel—an impressive accomplishment for an author who did not even speak English until her mid-teens. The book inspired five movies, including a 1934 version starring acclaimed actor Leslie Howard, and by the 1940s it had been translated into 20 languages.

From that point on, Orczy wrote prolifically, including the sequels to her most famous book, as well as other adventures and romances. She also wrote detective stories—some of which predated her Pimpernel—known as the Old Man in the Corner series. Deliberately avoiding the style of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famous Sherlock

Holmes stories, Orczy made a special contribution to the new armchair detective genre by starting her stories with the denouement and then working backward through the plot. Her hero was the brilliant and disagreeable Bill Owen who solves crimes, solely through the application of rigorous logic, from the corner of the ABC Teashop to the amazement of his audience, Polly Burton, a young journalist. The first of seven collections of the stories appeared in 1908.

Orczy also created the first fictional woman detective in her Lady Molly of Scotland Yard (1910), a series of 12 tales told by Lady Molly's devoted maid. While Molly is described as an intelligent, risk-taking woman of the world, most critics agree that she does not function either as an entirely believable character or a fully convincing detective. All of Lady Molly's cases involve only women and her sole motivation for crime-solving is to clear the falsely tarnished name of her lover. Once she accomplishes her mission, she gives up detective work forever. Orczy also created Irish lawyer Patrick Mulligan for another collection of detective stories, Skin o' My Tooth (1928).

In 1908, Orczy and her husband bought an estate away from London, where they cultivated an impressive garden. After World War I, they moved to Monte Carlo, although Orczy returned to her adopted homeland after Montagu's death and the end of World War II. She died in London on November 12, 1947.

sources:

Contemporary Authors. Vol. 104. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1982.

Staples, Katherine. "Emma Orczy" in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 70: British Mystery Writers, 1860–1919. Edited by Bernard Benstock. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1988.

This England. Spring 1998, pp. 48–50.

Jacqueline Mitchell , freelance writer, Detroit, Michigan