Trade Publication Article

The mystery behind the Baroness

Dirda, Michael

2015

Overview

When, with the help of her husband, she concocted the play based on The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905), it broke box office records and was later adapted and re-adapted for the movies, some scripts drawing further plot elements from the dozen later novels and short-story collections about her hero and his league of extraordinary gentlemen. Only half-way through the novel-with plenty of action still to come-does Marguerite start to wonder: \"What connection could there be between her exquisite dandy of a husband, with his fine clothes and refined, lazy ways, and the daring plotter who rescued French victims from beneath the very eyes of the leaders of a bloodthirsty revolution?\" Finally, the dark truth hits home: \"In betraying a nameless stranger to his fate in order to save her brother, had Marguerite Blakeney sent her husband to his death?\" While The Scarlet Pimpernel lives on as one of the world's great adventure novels, it is also a wonderful and unusual story about love and married life. [...]Baroness Orczy's own life (1865-1947) was almost as extraordinary as that of her various heroes. Ever since Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885) and She (1887), novels about lost civilizations had become a significant sub-genre of popular fiction, helped along by contemporary theories of a hollow earth, theosophist belief in ancient adepts inhabiting a mountain fastness in Tibet, and speculation about the possible survival of ancient Atlanteans in the South Seas.

• Publisher: Foundation for Cultural Review