Baroness Emmuska Orczy (1865-1947) was a British novelist, playwright and artist whose noble Hungarian origins afforded her an idyllic childhood and extensive education in the arts at schools in Brussels, Paris and London. In 1903, with the success of a play written by Orczy and her husband based on one of her short stories about an English aristocrat, Orczy rewrote the story as a novel that drew huge sales. As a result, ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’ cemented Orczy’s name in the literary world, and led to over a dozen sequels and countless television, film and musical reproductions. One such sequel is ‘The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel’, which was published in 1919 and consists of eleven short stories about Sir Percy Blakeney and his exploits during the French Revolution. The stories are set in 1793 but are set in no particular order.