Day 139 of Colourisation Project – September 23
Challenge: to publish daily a colourised photo that has some significance around the day of publication.
Born this day, 23 September 1865, Baroness Emma Magdolna Rozália Mária Jozefa Borbála ‘Emmuska‘ Orczy de Orczi was a Hungarian-born, British novelist, playwright and artist, more commonly known as Emma Orczy, the author of The Scarlet Pimpernel.
It was the swashbuckling adventures of the ‘elusive’ Sir Percy Blakeney, aka The Scarlet Pimpernel, first as the protagonist of a stage play in 1903 and then as the hero of a novel in 1905, that brought Orczy lasting fame. With the French Revolution as its backdrop, the novel, which had at first been rejected by publishers, captured the imaginations of her readers after the success of the stage play, which ran four years in London. It became a bestselling novel and was later adapted to many film productions, the most famous being the 1934 Hollywood production starring Leslie Howard and Merle Oberon.
Orczy went on to write more than twenty Pimpernel sequels over the next thirty-five years, including I Will Repay (1906), The Elusive Pimpernel (1908), The Way of the Scarlet Pimpernel (1933) and the last Pimpernel book, Mam’zelle Guillotine, (1940) but none were as successful as the first.
Whilst the Pimpernel series came to define Orczy’s literary career, her first venture into fiction was with crime stories written for magazines. Her first collection of detective stories, The Case of Miss Elliott (1905) featured the first of her detective characters, ‘the old man in the corner,’ who solves mysteries without leaving his chair.
a pioneering female detective who regularly out-performs her male associates.
Orczy was a prolific writer, working actively up until her eighties. She covered several genres of writing including adventure romances, historical fiction and espionage stories. In all she produced a large body of work which included 52 novels, 5 plays and 13 collections of short stories, as well as several translations of Hungarian works.The Enchanted Cat, Fairyland’s Beauty, Uletka and the White Lizard, which all went on to great success enabling Orczy to pursue her own writing.
She finished her autobiography, Links in the Chain of Life in 1947 just before her death in 1947, at the age of 82.
“I have so often been asked the question: But how did you come to think of ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’? And my answer has always been: It was God’s will that I should. And to you moderns, who perhaps do not believe as I do, I will say, In the chain of my life, there were so many links, all of which tended towards bringing me to the fulfillment of my destiny. And nothing can be quite so wonderful as the workings of a man’s or a woman’s destiny.” – Emma Orczy – Links in the Chain of Life (1947)