Baroness Orczy

Biography

Emma Orczy first stood before the Royal Academy in London as an artist: several of her paintings were shown there. She would become a writer later, and partly out of necessity.

She was born in Tarnaörs, in Hungary, on 23 September 1865 (according to other accounts, 27 September). Her father, Baron Félix Orczy, was a composer; her mother, Countess Emma Wass, came from the Hungarian aristocracy. Fearing peasant unrest, the family left their estate in 1868 and lived in Budapest, Brussels and Paris. In Paris Emma studied music, without success, and attended convent schools. In 1880, at fourteen, she moved with her parents to London. There she studied at art schools, among them the West London School of Art and the Heatherley School of Fine Art.

At art school she met the illustrator Henry George Montagu MacLean Barstow, the son of an English clergyman. They were married on 7 November 1894 at St Marylebone parish church. They had very little money, and Emma began working with her husband as a translator and illustrator: they translated Hungarian fairy tales and illustrated children’s books and magazines. In 1895 their short children’s stories “Juliette” appeared in the Royal Magazine. On 25 February 1899 their son John was born, their only child; he later became a writer too.

She began writing soon after his birth. Her first novel, “The Emperor’s Candlesticks” (1899), was a failure. The detective stories in the Royal Magazine did better, and so did the novel “In Mary’s Reign” (1901).

In 1903 the couple wrote the play “The Scarlet Pimpernel”, based on one of her short stories. The hero, an English aristocrat, Sir Percy Blakeney, who poses as a society fop while rescuing French nobles from the guillotine during the French Revolution, was, by her own account, conceived while she stood on a platform of the London Underground. She sent the novel version to twelve publishers. While their decisions were pending, the actors Fred Terry and Julia Neilson accepted the play. Audiences were small at first, but in London’s West End the production ran for about four years and gave more than two thousand performances; it opened there on 5 January 1905. The book then sold in huge numbers. The couple moved to Thanet, in Kent. More than a dozen sequels followed: the first, “I Will Repay” (1906), was the most popular, and the last, “Mam’zelle Guillotine”, appeared in 1940. Of her next three plays, none matched the success of the first.

Detective fiction went on alongside. The collection “The Case of Miss Elliott” came out in 1905; “The Old Man in the Corner” (1909) featured an amateur sleuth who solved crimes without leaving his table in a tea shop on the Strand. “Lady Molly of Scotland Yard” (1910) made a woman detective its heroine. In 1930 Orczy became a founding member of the Detection Club.

During the First World War she set up the Women of England’s Active Service League, an unofficial organisation that urged women to persuade men to volunteer for the army. The aim was to enrol a hundred thousand women, and about twenty thousand joined. She is also named among the founders of the White Feather campaign, in which women handed white feathers to men who had not enlisted.

Her earnings from books allowed her to buy a villa in Monte Carlo (by other accounts, in Nice). There Orczy spent the Second World War, and she could return to London only after it. In 1942 her husband died in Monte Carlo. Left alone, she wrote her memoirs, “Links in the Chain of Life”, published in 1947.

Baroness Orczy died on 12 November 1947 in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire.