Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel: A Publishing History by Sally Dugan (review)

Sally Dugan is Associate Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University. Her critical debut offers us a lucid and invigorating perspective on the popular historical novel The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905) by Baroness Orczy, tracing its primordial existence through initial story failures and showcasing the protagonist’s seemingly unending tenure in the English literary and national imagination. This book advances a very important observation on the evolution and reincarnation of the lead character that is Sir Percy Blakeney, elevated to represent a nostalgic view of Englishness through his dandyism and heroics, by reminding us that paratextual contextualization serves us well in understanding narrative and history alike. Dugan acknowledges that this novel and its many sequels may not belong in the British canon, but she rightfully suggests that Sir Percy’s evolving character from the turn of the century until post World War II can tell us quite a bit about the withering British Empire and its readers.

The book is organized into six chapters, each analyzing a different part of The Scarlet Pimpernel’s success. This ranges from Orczy’s adept marketing acumen to theater and movie adaptations of the story. The introduction is quite powerful, emphasizing the importance of the protagonist and Orczy’s conscious decision to have Sir Percy stand for English imperialism while having him fight in exotic lands, of which France was the preferred and obvious enemy. This is where the novelist’s smarts came into play, focused on the Empire’s reinterpretation of the French Revolution. The fin de siècle was at hand, yet the English reader enjoyed romanticizing about a better time when aristocratic values ruled the day. Dugan captures Orczy’s narrative of bending time and space to fit the melodrama of Sir Percy’s secret adventures.

Chapters one and three prove to be strongest of the six, with Orczy’s writer’s journey and writing process well analyzed and documented. Dugan shows us that Orzcy knew her audience and listened to her editors. Orczy’s use of the aristocratic “baroness” in front of her Hungarian name added to the fusion of Englishness and exoticism in her work. Her failed exploits as a painter and her visit to Paris during the Great Exhibition opened her eyes to an audience’s desire for their own national image. Orczy took a queue from Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities, painting the French as the Empire’s Other, sans-cullottes (without pants) and near barbaric, with red native-like skin and nasty vices. With this narrative approach in mind, Dugan criticizes Edward Said’s Orientalism, stating his ideas on imperialism as limited in scope. He seems to have forgotten that Orczy and Dickens alike “colonize” other colonizing empires through their own barbaric representation, the professor writes (76).

According to Dugan, the novelist becomes a “champion of empire,” since The Scarlet Pimpernel permits us to read the nation just as well “as the publishing history of the Bible, Shakespeare, Byron and Walter Scott does for the preceding centuries” (109). She adds in chapter five that the Greening’s Colonial Editions and Hodder’s Yellow Jackets stand as examples of just how far reaching The Scarlet Pimpernel was, an international “imagined community” created overseas, to use Benedict Anderson’s term.

Chapter two is interesting, as it covers Orczy’s relationship with acclaimed actors Ellen and Fred Terry and the small circle of playwrights she worked with in order to get the story on stage. Dugan maintains a good sense of humor throughout her book, especially when considering the well-documented stint the story had on stage. She lists The New York Times’ review of the play before it landed on Broadway, which held the following title: “The Worst Play in London the Biggest Hit” (107).

Chapter four feels repetitive. We are told that Sir Percy comes to represent Britishness instead of Englishness in the twentieth century, the protagonist now exhibiting nationalism rather than imperialism in his characterization. Perhaps this could have been relegated to...