Baroness Orczy

Emma Magdolna Rozália Mária Jozefa Borbála Orczy (1865–1947), known as Baroness Orczy, was born into the Hungarian nobility, moved with her family to Brussels, Paris and finally London, and trained as a painter before turning to writing in English, her third language. After years of modest success with detective stories, she and her husband wrote the play The Scarlet Pimpernel, which became a hit in 1905; the novel that followed and its many sequels made the masked rescuer of French aristocrats one of the most popular heroes in fiction. She also created The Old Man in the Corner, one of the first armchair detectives.