The Scarlet Pimpernel

by Orczy, Gary Happenstand (Introduction)

Overview

A timeless novel of adventure, intrigue, and romance is sparked by one man's defiance in the face of authority...

The year is 1792. The French Revolution, driven to excess by its own triumph, has turned into a reign of terror. Daily, tumbrels bearing new victims to the guillotine roll over the cobbled streets of Paris.… Thus the stage is set for one of the most enthralling novels of historical adventure ever written.
 
The mysterious figure known as the Scarlet Pimpernel, sworn to rescue helpless men, women, and children from their doom; his implacable foe, the French agent Chauvelin, relentlessly hunting him down; and lovely Marguerite Blakeney, a beautiful French exile married to an English lord and caught in a terrible conflict of loyalties—all play their parts in a suspenseful tale that ranges from the squalid slums of Paris to the aristocratic salons of London, from intrigue on a great English country estate to the final denouement on the cliffs of the French coast.
 
There have been many imitations of The Scarlet Pimpernel, but none has ever equaled its superb sense of color and drama and its irresistible gift of wonderfully romantic escape.

With an Introduction by Gary Hoppenstand

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780451527622
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/01/2000
Series:	Signet Classics Series
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	131,927
Product dimensions:	4.19(w) x 7.88(h) x 0.73(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

The byline used by Emma Magdalena Rosalia Maria Josefa Barbara Orczy (1865-1947) was Baroness Orczy. Orczy was born in Tarna-Ors, Hungary, the only daughter of Baron Felix Orczy, a noted 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 at the age of fifteen. She was educated at West London School of Art. Orcy's first detective stories appeared in magazines, but as a writer, she gained fame in 1903 with the stage version of The Scarlet Pimpernel. In the late 1910s, Orcy 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 who teaches 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 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.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter I
(Continues…)

---

Excerpted from "The Scarlet Pimpernel"
by .
Copyright © 2000 Gary Orczy.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

1	Paris: September, 1792	1
2	Dover: "The Fisherman's Rest"	11
3	The Refugees	21
4	The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel	31
5	Marguerite	39
6	An Exquisite of '92	45
7	The Secret Orchard	57
8	The Accredited Agent	65
9	The Outrage	77
10	In the Opera Box	85
11	Lord Grenville's Ball	101
12	The Scrap of Paper	109
13	Either--Or?	119
14	One O'clock Precisely!	123
15	Doubt	133
16	Richmond	139
17	Farewell	155
18	The Mysterious Device	163
19	The Scarlet Pimpernel	169
20	The Friend	179
21	Suspense	187
22	Calais	197
23	Hope	209
24	The Death-trap	217
25	The Eagle and the Fox	225
26	The Jew	235
27	On the Track	245
28	The Pere Blanchard's Hut	253
29	Trapped	263
30	The Schooner	269
31	The Escape	283

Reading Group Guide

The first and most successful in the Baroness’s series of books that feature Percy Blakeney, who leads a double life as an English fop and a swashbuckling rescuer of aristocrats, The Scarlet Pimpernel was the blueprint for what became known as the masked-avenger genre. As Anne Perry writes in her Introduction, the novel “has almost reached its first centenary, and it is as vivid and appealing as ever because the plotting is perfect. It is a classic example of how to construct, pace, and conclude a plot. . . . To rise on the crest of laughter without capsizing, to survive being written, rewritten, and reinterpreted by each generation, is the mark of a plot that is timeless and universal, even though it happens to be set in England and France of 1792.”

Editorial Reviews

Arguably the best adventure story ever published and certainly the most influential that appeared during the early decades of the twentieth century.”—Gary Hoppenstand

From the Publisher