Baroness Orczy

Baroness Emmuska Orczy (1865, Tarnaörs, Hungary - November 12 1947, London), British novelist, playwright and artist. Some of her paintings were exhibited at the Royal Academy in London.

Emma Magdalena Rosalia Maria Josefa Barbara Orczy was the daughter of composer Baron Felix Orczy and his wife, Countess Emma Wass.

Orczy wrote many adventure romances, among which the best known are those featuring Sir Percy Blakeney, the Scarlet Pimpernel.

In London in 1894 she married Montague Maclean Barstow (d.1942), who co-authored some of her plays and was a fellow student at the Heatherby School of Art. They had one child, John Montague Orczy-Barstow, born 25 Feb 1899; he was a writer under the name John Blakeney, the surname taken from that of his mother's most famous fictional character.

Her grandson, Michael Felix Orczy-Barstow, was a British aviator and an early computer systems analyst who died in Corpus Christi, Texas.

Works

(incomplete)

• The Scarlet Pimpernel (play 1903, novel 1905)
• The Sin of William Jackson (play, 1906)
• The Case of Miss Elliot (collection of mysteries, 1905)
• The Elusive Pimpernel (1908)
• Beau Brocade (play, 1908)
• Lady Molly of Scotland Yard (1910)
• Castles in the Air (collection, 1921)
• Skin o' My Tooth (collection, 1928)
• Mam'zelle Guillotine (1940)
• Links in the Chain of Life (autobiography, 1947)

External links

• Project Gutenberg e-texts of some of Baroness Emmuska Orczy's works