Hungarians in History: Baroness Emma Orczy

On this night of the 95th Academy Awards, with Hungary’s entry Blockade failing to make the shortlist for Best International Film, we thought we’d take a great departure from the present and look back in history, away from California and towards the United Kingdom, where one of film’s most reprised heroes was born onto the page by playwright and novelist Emma Magdalena Rozália Mária Jozefa Borbála Orczy de Orci, or more simply and commonly known as, Baroness Orczy.

The famous character she created was the Scarlet Pimpernel, the swashbuckling hero of no less than eighteen books, and seven films, not to mention numerous stage and radio plays, television series, and even a musical. The Pimpernel ‘Universe’ was broad indeed. The Scarlet Pimpernel was a French aristocrat, but also a kind of patrician ‘Anonymous’ figure of the French Revolution, undertaking daring missions in Batmanlike fashion.

The Creator of the Scarlet Pimpernel, Baroness Orczy, was born in Tarnaörs, Hungary, of aristocratic stock. Under the threat of a peasant revolution, her family fled with her, at age 14, across Europe, eventually settling in London. Determined to be a painter, she graduated from art school, but soon found herself married and with child. To supplement her husband’s meager income, she turned to writing: first literature, then detective stories, before creating the character of Pimpernel.

The novel the Scarlet Pimpernel was written in 1904 with her husband and based on Orczy’s stageplay of the same name. The play would go on to be produced on in London’s West End, and the novel would eventually be published and become an international phenomenon. The site Goodreads summarizes the short book as such: Armed with only his wits and his cunning, one man recklessly defies the French revolutionaries and rescues scores of innocent men, women, and children from the deadly guillotine. His friends and foes know him only as the Scarlet Pimpernel. But the ruthless French agent Chauvelin is sworn to discover his identity and to hunt him down. The book and its sequels’ success in the UK and around the world would ensure that Baroness Orczy could once again live the aristocratic lifestyle she had to abandon in Hungary.

A champion of aristocracy but also an exile and immigrant who knew hard times, Baroness Orczy was clearly a complicated person., as her politics evinced. Though she spent WWII in Monaco, she greatly favored England’s involvement in the war. In her own way, she had influence in her birth country of Hungary, where, according to Wikipedia, “Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat, was directly inspired by "Pimpernel" Smith, a 1941 British anti-Nazi propaganda thriller, to begin rescuing Hungarian Jews during World War II.”

The Baroness died in 1947, but her character, The Scarlet Pimpernel, will no doubt be resurrected time and time again.

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