New Publication: The Scarlet Pimpernel : A Publishing History

Laura Vivanco

In Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel: A Publishing History, Sally Dugan notes that in recent editions of The Scarlet Pimpernel

Publishing practices continue to reflect a wide divergence of marketing tactics. Is The Scarlet Pimpernel spy/adventure fiction, thriller, mystery, historical romance or ‘children’s classic’? The Folio Society chose the historical novelist Hilary Mantel to introduce its 1997 ‘classic’ version, covered in vegetable
parchment, with knowing post-modern illustrations by Lucy Weller [...]. The Random House Modern Library edition (2000) covers all bases with an introduction by the historical mystery writer Anne Perry; a reader’s group guide; a soft focus cover suggesting historical romance and an endorsement from popular culture scholar Gary Hoppenstand, citing The Scarlet Pimpernel as ‘arguably the best adventure story ever published’ [...].

The sole surviving manuscript page of The Scarlet Pimpernel has a few last-minute changes in Orczy’s handwriting that heighten the discourse of romance; an indecision about whether to describe her heroine’s hair as ‘ardent’ or ‘golden’, and the addition of the colour of her eyes [...]. Orczy’s choice of this page as a sample for Story-Teller magazine suggests a willingness to be perceived as a romance writer. She herself wrote that her focus was on ‘pictures, love-scenes, adventures both comic and tragic, thrilling moments, dramatic scenes, and above all character – always character’. Although Orczy’s comments about her own work have to be treated with caution, this contains an important clue to the Scarlet Pimpernel’s longevity. Behind the wigs and Mechlin lace cuffs lies an enduring human story of love, misunderstandings, conflict of loyalties, audacious bravery – and a dramatic double life. (7-8)

This reminded me of Lauren Willig's description of the attempts to classify her Pink Carnation series:

When I wrote [...] the book that became The Secret History of the Pink Carnation, I was pretty sure that I was writing a romance novel. [...] On my first phone call with my brand new agent, I burbled about the book being in the tradition of Julia Quinn and Amanda Quick, and could we please, pretty please, shop the manuscript to Avon?  Visions of mass market paperbacks danced in my head.

“I’m not entirely sure you’ve written what you’ve think you’ve written,” came the voice of my new agent across the line.  “Let me try something else first….”

“Sure!  Absolutely!” I said [...] one month later my agent called me back to tell me that a prestigious hardcover house was making an offer—but not as a romance.  “You’ve invented a new genre!” he said.  “Historical chick lit!” [...]

Plans proceeded apace for the publication of the book [...]. It was going to be published in hardcover, as Fiction & Literature, with a chick lit cover featuring a modern woman in a Burberry jacket with a very cute bag.  I had nightmares about readers opening it, finding themselves in the Regency, and demanding their money back. [...]

Then, overnight, chick lit died.  RIP.  Within two days, my publisher had come up with a new, historical cover (and I breathed a very deep sigh of relief).  Just about to go on my first ever book publicity junket, I was warned, “Whatever you do, don’t call it chick lit!  It’s historical fiction.  Got that?  Historical fiction.”

I’d gone through three different genres without re-writing a word.

Meanwhile, the book hit the shelves, followed by sequels, and the genre confusion continued.  I was adopted by the mystery community, who informed me that what I was really writing were historical mysteries, and why wasn’t I being shelved in mystery, where I belonged?  Friendly Borders reps told me that my covers were all wrong and I needed something that correctly represented the spirit of the books.  What would that be? I asked.  They didn’t know either.  In the absence of consensus, the books went into that great catch-all category on the shelves: Fiction & Literature.

I just went on playing genre stew, writing what I was writing, going to everyone’s conferences, and hoping that someone would eventually figure out where on earth to shelve me.

This went on until 2009, when the market tanked, e-books took off, and suddenly romance was outselling other genres.  After years of being told, “Stop calling your books romance!”, the world had come full circle.  I got another one of those phone calls: the first Pink book was going to be reprinted in mass market—huzzah!—with a romance cover.  And, by the way, did I realize I’d been writing romance? [...]

As to what my books really are… I have no idea.  I’ll leave it to you to decide. 

It perhaps goes without saying (but I'll say it anyway), that there is a direct relationship between Willig's novels and Orczy's. Willig has written that

The idea for the story [in her series] emerged from endless years of overexposure to the Scarlet Pimpernel and his brethren (by whom I mean any dashing rogue, usually played by Errol Flynn, who delivers a witty line, jumps off a table, brandishes a sword, and defeats the perspiring villain with one hand held languidly behind his back).

Amusingly, in addition to having 11 sequels, The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905) had a precursor, published in 1898 in Pearson's Magazine, which was titled "The Red Carnation":

The Scarlet Pimpernel's first incarnation — in a short story called 'The Red Carnation' (1898) — was as plain Eugen Borgensky, a nihilist Pole at the head of a secret band of men identified by the red carnations they wore in their buttonholes. They plot to assassinate the Russian Tsar, but the plot is foiled when Borgensky's wife puts herself between the Tsar and his would–be assassins. (Dugan "Anarchy")

The contents page and an excerpt from the introduction to Sally Dugan's book are available from here. Sally Dugan's "Anarchy and Magic: Film Versions of The Scarlet Pimpernel Myth" appeared in issue 5 (2010) of Peer English and can be downloaded here. Willig's account of the classification of her series has recently been re-published at the Popular Romance Project.

Modernism and the Women's Popular Romance in Britain, 1885-1925

Laura Vivanco

Dr. Martin Hipsky's Modernism and the Women's Popular Romance in Britain, 1885-1925, recently published by Ohio University Press, has been described as "a must-read rethink of modernism itself." I asked Marty if he'd like to visit Teach Me Tonight to tell us a bit more about his new book, and he agreed. I should note that although he describes it as a "study of the history of the modern romance novel," his focus on such an early period in the history of "the modern romance novel" does mean that some of the popular romances he studies (including Marie Corelli's The Sorrows of Satan and Elinor Glyn's Three Weeks) would not be classified as romances according to the RWA definition, although many others would.

Martin Hipsky

Ohio Wesleyan University

mahipsky@owu.edu

As a scholar of British and Irish literary modernism, I first became interested in the romance novel of the fin de siècle and early twentieth century when I was writing about the London avant-garde and Wyndham Lewis's journal Blast (1914-15). Lewis's fiery cultural manifestos (co-signed by Ezra Pound) featured the name of celebrity romance-writer Marie Corelli, whom they took to be a totem of Edwardian popular culture, and a sort of demotic figure for cultural tendencies that they, as a self-proclaimed vanguard, were rebelling against. I discovered that (as readers of this blog may know) Corelli had been publishing best-selling mystical romances since the mid-1880s, and in 1895, with her blockbuster romance The Sorrows of Satan, had sold the most copies of any novel in the history of Britain to that point.

So I read some of Corelli's romances, and she became the inspiration of a research project: to investigate the most successful romance novels written by women in the same years that witnessed the emergence of what we now call high modernist culture, and to consider the relationship -- as perceived then, but more importantly as legible now, with the benefit of historical hindsight -- between this ultra-popular mode and the experimental narratives of such canonical figures as Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Rebecca West, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence.

My study offers interpretations of eleven top-selling books, all women-authored romances, in the years around the turn of the British twentieth century. This set of romances includes works by Mary Ward ("Mrs. Humphry Ward"), Marie Corelli, Emma Orczy, Elinor Glyn, Florence Barclay, Victoria Cross, Ethel Dell, and E. M. Hull. For a list of the eleven romances I have chosen as my primary interpretive focus (a limited selection, as most of these eight writers published a number of romances), you can look at the Works Cited list below.

Although I note the occasional condescension that the modernist writers, predictably enough, expressed toward these women romance-writers, that is not the cultural dynamic of interest here. Rather, I argue that certain "high" modernist works, for all their intellectual challenges, nonetheless evinced a powerful force of affect in parallel with the affective appeal popular romances by women. While the parallel was not conscious on either side of the romance/modernism divide, what was conscious on the part of the two sets of writers, in different ways, was the project of creative reaction against the literary realism that was so esteemed by the (mostly male) cultural arbiters of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. This parallel, I argue, has powerful implications about the unfulfilling experience of living amid an often alienating and isolating modernity.

Modernism and the Women’s Popular Romance in Britain, then, is not primarily a celebration of either select high modernist works, or select romance novels of the late-Victorian-to-modernist period. It is instead an attempt to explain the unprecedented (and often forgotten) appeal of that era’s secular, women-authored romance. As I say in the preface to the study, between 1885 and 1925 these romances loomed as a series of pinnacles along the highest plateau of popular British (in most cases, also North American, and indeed global anglophone) reading. For this socio-historical reason and many others (including the pleasures of discovery that these romances can still bring to their readers), I believe that this group of romances constitutes a very important part of recent anglophone literary-cultural history. I hope that the book makes some contribution to our understanding of the vast phenomenon of the woman-authored romance reading of our not-too-distant past.

Works Cited

Barclay, Florence. The Rosary. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1909.

Corelli, Marie. Innocent: Her Fancy and His Fact. New York: A. L. Burton Company, 1914.

_____. The Sorrows of Satan [1895]. Ed. by Peter Keating. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

_____. The Treasure of Heaven.. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1906.

Cross, Victoria [Vivian Cory]. Anna Lombard. New York: Kensington Press, 1901.

Dell, Ethel. The Way of an Eagle [1912]. London: Virago, 1996.

Glyn, Elinor. Three Weeks. London: Duckworth, 1907.

Hull, E. M. The Sheik [1919]. Philadelphia: Pine Street Press, 2001.

Orczy, Baroness [Emmuska]. The Scarlet Pimpernel [1905] “Popular Edition.” London: Greening and Co., 1909.

Ward, Mary Augusta. Lady Rose’s Daughter. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1903.

_____. Robert Elsmere [1888]. Edited by Clyde de L. Ryals. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967.