Baroness Orczy (1865-1947) was a Hungarian-born British novelist and playwright best-known for her series of novels featuring the Scarlet Pimpernel, the alter-ego of Sir Percy Blakeney, a wealthy English fop who turns into a quick-thinking escape artist in order to save ill-fated French royalty from 'Madame Guillotine' during the French Revolution. These novels established the 'hero with a secret identity' into popular culture. The Scarlet Pimpernel first appeared in a short story which Orczy and her husband used as the base for a play in 1903, whilst she also submitted a novelisation of the same plot to 12 publishers. The play was taken up for a West End production which after a slow start ran for four years, breaking many stage records and generating huge sales for the novel and its many sequels. Orczy was a prolific author, mainly of historical romances. This historical novel, subtitled A Tale of Old Provence and first published in 1922, is a retelling on the medieval French story Aucassin et Nicolette dating to the late 12th or early 13th century and orginally a combination of prose and verse.