Baroness Orczy published The Scarlet Pimpernel in 1905, after a stage version had been running successfully in London. The novel is set in 1792, during the Reign of Terror, when the guillotine was executing aristocrats and their families daily in Paris. The Scarlet Pimpernel is the pseudonym of an English gentleman who leads a small band of volunteers in extracting condemned aristocrats from France. In England, he is known as Sir Percy Blakeney, an apparently vacuous dandy of no intellectual distinction. His wife Marguerite, the most admired woman in London society, married him believing he was exactly as empty as he appeared, and has discovered that she cannot respect the man she loves.
The masked hero who maintains a public persona of incompetence to protect his secret work is a genre archetype that Orczy did not invent but popularized in modern form. The Scarlet Pimpernel is the direct ancestor of Zorro, Superman's Clark Kent, and Bruce Wayne. What distinguishes Orczy's execution of the device is the role of Marguerite: the central dramatic tension is not whether the Pimpernel will be caught by Chauvelin, the French agent pursuing him, but whether Marguerite will understand her husband before Chauvelin uses her as a tool against him. The domestic psychology is more carefully managed than the adventure plot, which resolves through a series of improbabilities the novel barely explains.
The novel is read now primarily for its archetypal status, as the foundational text of the disguised-hero genre and the first popular fictional treatment of the French Reign of Terror as adventure backdrop. Orczy's sympathy is clearly with the aristocrats rather than the revolution, and the historical interpretation embedded in the novel's premise is ideologically specific in ways worth acknowledging. Within those limitations, the central device works as efficiently as it has worked in every subsequent version, and the Marguerite storyline retains an emotional credibility that keeps the adventure sequences from functioning as pure mechanism.
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