The Elusive Pimpernel

Baroness Emmuska Orczy (1865-1947) was a British novelist, playwright and artist whose noble Hungarian origins afforded her an idyllic childhood and extensive education in the arts at schools in Brussels, Paris and London. In 1903, with the success of a play written by Orczy and her husband based on one of her short stories about an English aristocrat, Orczy rewrote the story as a novel that drew huge sales. As a result, "The Scarlet Pimpernel" cemented Orczy's name in the literary world, a...