The Mysterious Death on the...
Baroness Orczy
Emma Magdolna Rozália Mária Jozefa Borbála Orczy de Orci, or more familiarly, Baroness Emmuska Orczy, was born on the 23rd September 1865, in Tarnaörs, Heves County, Hungary.
The family lived in their ancestral home; a great, rambling farmhouse on the river Tarna. Orczy’s memories of the time were of sophisticated parties, sparkling conversation, joyful dancing and gypsy music. But fear of a peasant uprising meant moving to Budapest and then many years of semi-nomadic travels across Europe.
Arriving in London in 1880 Orczy, aged 15, studied painting and, a few years later, had some pictures exhibited at the Royal Academy.
London, she now felt, was home, her spiritual birthplace.
Art school also provided a husband; the young illustrator, Montague Barstow, the son of an English clergyman.
Determined to prove herself as a writer she plunged headlong into a writing career shortly after her son’s birth. In a mere five weeks she wrote the adventure classic ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’. Originally rejected, she re-worked it as a successful play. It was then published as a best-selling book in 1905 and later a very successful movie.
Politically Orczy was a conservative with an unwavering belief in the superiority of the aristocracy and of the British Empire. During World War I, she formed the Women of England's Active Service League, tasked with recruiting female volunteers "to persuade every man I know to offer his service to his country".
In the coming years the family lived on an estate in Kent, in a tasteful London home and an extravagant villa in Monte Carlo. All the while Orczy’s pen wrote novels, short stories, plays, translations and, eventually, her autobiography.
Baroness Orczy died on the 12th November 1947 at Henley-on-Thames in South Oxfordshire. She was 82.
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