I was born Baroness Emma Madgalena Rosalia Maria Josefa Barbara Orczy into the Hungarian landed aristocracy in Tarna-Örs, Hungary, on 23 September 1865. I was named Emma (or Emmuska) after my mother, Countess Wass. My father, Baron Felix Orczy, a gifted amateur composer who was friends with Liszt, Wagner, Gounod, and Massenet, was forced to leave Hungary because of an 1868 peasant uprising against his agricultural innovations. My family moved to Budapest, to Brussels, to Paris, and finally to London.
I was educated at schools in Brussels and Paris, where I unsuccessfully studied music. In London I studied painting at the West London School of Art and at Heatherley's. While at school I exhibited my work at the Royal Academy. During my studies at Heatherley's I met Montagu Barstow, an illustrator, whom I married in 1894. Our only child, John Montagu Orczy Barstow, was born in 1899.During the early years of our marriage we were very active in the aristocratic London social circles to which my family had introduced me. However, we were poor. To supplement the family income I began to translate and illustrate fairy tales. I also wrote romance and adventure tales for the popular press. My first novel, The Emperor's Candlesticks (1899), was a failure. My widespread popularity came only in 1905 with the enormous London stage success of The Scarlet Pimpernel, which ran for years in many different productions. The play called attention to the novel of the same title. It had been written in 1902 but failed to find a publisher until 1905. The Scarlet Pimpernel, Sir Percy Blakeney, is an English rescuer of French aristocrats during the Reign of Terror. His rescues depend on a double identity: at home in England he is known as a foppish, effete socialite, but, as the daring Scarlet Pimpernel, he risks his life to save those unjustly accused in France. I wrote many sequels to my most famous book.
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The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905) begins thus;
"Paris: September, 1792. A surging, seething, murmuring crowd of beings that are human only in name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and of hate. The hour, some little time before sunset, and the place, the West Barricade, at the very spot where, a decade later, a proud tyrant raised an undying monument to the nation's glory and his own vanity."
You can find out more about my life by reading my blog.
