WB Horton - From Hero to Criminal – Prepublication Final Draft (2020) 1 From Hero to Criminal (and Back Again): The Yellow Adventures of Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel in Indonesia 1 William Bradley HORTON Akita University This is the story of a story. Our story starts in England around 1900, when the Hungarian Baroness Emma Orczy began to write an adventure novel about a mysterious and heroic figure who rescued aristocrats facing the guillotine during the “reign of terror” following the French revolution (1789- 1799). Baroness Orczy was born into an aristocratic family in Hungary in 1865. Fleeing their rural home in Orci due to fear of peasant revolts in 1868, the Orczy family eventually settled briefly in Brussels and Paris, where Emma tried to study music, perhaps because her father, Baron Felix Orczy de Orci, was a composer. In 1880, the family moved to England where Emma studied art and met her future husband, Montagu Barstow. The couple worked together, translating and illustrating, but during the late 1890s Emma began to write fiction—short stories, novels, and plays. After one relatively unsuccessful novel (The Emperor's Candlesticks (1899)) and a few short stories, Emma Orczy wrote her first version of Scarlet Pimpernel. Figure 1. Baroness Orczy (1865-1947), photo by Bassano (1920) 1 This article is based on the keynote lecture presented at the annual meeting of the Akita Association of English Studies held at Akita University on 1 December 2019. Thanks are due to Cavin Yeo for assistance in collecting material for this article, and to Sylvie Probowati for the use of her amazing 1957 book. Part of this research was supported by JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research B #19H01321 (Mayumi Yamamoto, Principle Investigator).