The Scarlet Pimpernel

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Penguin Group USA, Incorporated, Sep 17, 1974 - Fiction
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."

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About the author (1974)

Emmuska Orczy was born in Tarnaörs, Heves County, Hungary on September 23, 1865. She attended West London School of Art and Heatherley's School of Fine Art. Collaborating with her husband Henry Montague Barstow, she produced and illustrated a translated version of Old Hungarian Fairy Tales in 1895. Her first novel, The Emperor's Candlesticks, was published in 1899. Her other works include In Mary's Reign, The Scarlet Pimpernel, I Will Repay, Mam'zelle Guillotine, Lady Molly of Scotland Yard, and The Nest of the Sparrowhawk. She died on November 12, 1947.

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