Product Description

The first and most successful in the Baroness’s series of books that feature Percy Blakeney, who leads a double life as an English fop and a swashbuckling rescuer of aristocrats, The Scarlet Pimpernel was the blueprint for what became known as the masked-avenger genre. As Anne Perry writes in her Introduction, the novel “has almost reached its first centenary, and it is as vivid and appealing as ever because the plotting is perfect. It is a classic example of how to construct, pace, and conclude a plot. . . . To rise on the crest of laughter without capsizing, to survive being written, rewritten, and reinterpreted by each generation, is the mark of a plot that is timeless and universal, even though it happens to be set in England and France of 1792.”


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #176341 in Books
• Published on: 1999-09-21
• Released on: 1999-09-21
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 8.30" h x .94" w x 6.40" l, 1.25 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

From AudioFile
With the stage debut of The Scarlet Pimpernel (1903), the Baroness Orczy invented the "masked avenger" genre of fiction--the swashbuckling hero of dual identity. Her progeny include Zorro, Superman, The Lone Ranger and many others. The Baroness's Pimpernel is a British fop who, in a play and series of popular novels, daringly spirited condemned innocents out of France during the Reign of Terror. Hugh Laurie, best known Stateside as the foppish Bertie Wooster in TV's "Wooster and Jeeves," plunges into these two adventures with childlike relish. Yes, he is corny; yes, he overdoes it; but irresistibly. That's what this fare is made for. As he reads, one pictures, not the dashing Leslie Howard, cinema's Pimpernel, but a little boy performing for the family behind his homemade puppet theater. Sorry, Baroness, I know this isn't what you had in mind, but it's far better. Y.R. An AudioFile Earphones Award winner. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Review
“Arguably the best adventure story ever published and certainly the most influential that appeared during the early decades of the twentieth century.”—Gary Hoppenstand


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Ingram
THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL--literature's greatest alias. Behind that mysterious moniker hides a daring nobleman, masked by various disguises, working to undermine the Reign of Terror in the wake of the French Revolution. Who is this elusive character who rescues aristocrats from the guillotine and whose signature trademark is a blood-red flower, the Scarlet Pimpernel?.