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What became of it

The Scarlet Pimpernel

Baroness Orczy · first published 1905

The play came before the novel, and the disguise came before every hero who has used one since.

9 versions · 1917–1982 · screen, stage

Orczy wrote the stage version first; it was the theatre that made the book a bestseller rather than the other way round. Leslie Howard played Sir Percy in 1934 and then, in 1941, played him again in modern dress as “Pimpernel” Smith — rescuing scientists from the Nazis instead of aristocrats from the guillotine, which is either the boldest adaptation on this list or the most obvious.

The pattern the book invented is now everywhere: an idle fop in public, a rescuer in secret, and a wife who does not know. Every masked hero of the following century is in its debt. Chuck Jones even did the Daffy Duck version, The Scarlet Pumpernickel, which is how you can tell a story has fully entered the language.

The Bastille in the Early Days of Its Demolition
The Bastille in the Early Days of Its Demolition · Hubert Robert · 1789 — a plate from our edition
The moment

1903 on stage, 1905 in print

Orczy wrote about the Terror for an Edwardian audience that had grown up on the idea of the French Revolution as the great cautionary tale of the age. She was Hungarian, from a family that had lost its estates in a peasant uprising, and had come to London with nothing.

A dozen publishers turned down the novel. The play succeeded first, and the book followed it — which is the reverse of the usual order, and the reason the story reads the way it does: entrances, disguises, curtain lines.

On screen

8

Film and television, earliest first.

  • 1917 The Scarlet Pimpernel Richard Stanton
  • 1934 The Scarlet Pimpernel Harold Young
  • 1941 "Pimpernel" Smith Leslie Howard
  • 1950 The Fighting Pimpernel Michael Powell
  • 1950 The Scarlet Pumpernickel Chuck Jones
  • 1982 The Scarlet Pimpernel Clive Donner
  • — The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel David MacDonald
  • — The Scarlet Pimpernel

On stage

1

Opera, musical theatre and ballet made from it.

  • — The Scarlet Pimpernel Frank Wildhorn

Versions are listed where they are documented. A century of stage productions and most broadcasts were never catalogued at all, so this is what can be shown rather than everything that was ever made.