The Scarlet Pimpernel
Baroness Orczy, 1905
In the Terror, an English dandy and his glittering wife move through a France that is hunting a masked rescuer known only as the Scarlet Pimpernel.
Baroness Orczy
1865–1947
Orczy's books are quick, theatrical and a little sly: secrets kept from the people closest to you, chases run on nerve and disguise, and a narrator who enjoys the game as much as the characters do. Start with The Scarlet Pimpernel, the one that sets the pattern, or The Old Man in the Corner if you would rather sit still in a teashop and watch a murder get taken apart by a man who never shows his hand.
Feels like society, morality and unease.
Start with The Scarlet Pimpernel.
Born Emma Orczy in Hungary and raised in London and Paris, she put the Pimpernel on stage first: a hit 1903 play ran for years before the novel appeared in 1905.
A marriage measured in how many rooms apart two people sleep.
All else was quiet round her. She had heard the horses prancing as they were being led away to their distant stables, the hurrying of servants’ feet as they had all gone within to rest: the house also was quite still. In two separate suites of apartments, just above the magnificent reception-rooms, lights were still burning, they were her rooms, and his, well divided from each other by the whole width of the house, as far apart as their own lives had become. Involuntarily she sighed—at that moment she could really not have told why. Books by Baroness Orczy
The Old Man in the Corner
Baroness Orczy, 1909
A nameless man in a teashop solves London's murders from his chair, knotting string, while a young journalist listens — and never gets proof.
The Elusive Pimpernel
Baroness Orczy, 1908
The Scarlet Pimpernel returns to Revolutionary France, and the spy he humiliated is waiting with a bargain, a locked prison and a very careful trap.
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