The After House - Paperback

The byline used by Emma Magdalena Rosalia Maria Josefa Barbara Orczy (1865-1947) was Baroness Orczy. Orczy was born in Tarna-Ors, Hungary, the only daughter of Baron Felix Orczy, a noted composer and conductor, and his wife, Emma. Orczy moved with her parents from Budapest to Brussels to Paris and then to London, where she learned to speak English at the age of fifteen. She was educated at West London School of Art. Orcy's first detective stories appeared in magazines, but as a writer, she gained fame in 1903 with the stage version of The Scarlet Pimpernel. In the late 1910s, Orcy and her husband moved to Monte Carlo, where they stayed during the Nazi occupation. Her husband died in 1943, and after World War II, she spent her remaining years in England. Gary Hoppenstand is a professor who teaches in the Department of American Thought and Language at Michigan State University. He has published numerous books and articles on topics ranging from nineteenth-century British and American literature to film studies. He has been nominated twice for the World Fantasy Award, and he has won the Popular Culture Association's National Book Award for his textbook, Popular Fiction: An Anthology. He has worked on a Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition of P.C. Wren's Beau Geste and has published a Penguin Classics omnibus edition of Anthony Hope's two novels The Prisoner of Zenda and Rupert of Hentzau.

Baroness Emma Orczy was born in Hungary in 1865, the daughter of the composer Baron Félix Orczy de Orci. The Orczy family, fearing a peasant revolution, left their country estate for Budapest in 1868 and settled in London in 1880. There Emma attended art school and met her future husband, a clergyman's son, Montague MacLean Barstow. Following the birth of their only child, she began writing historical novels and plays to supplement his low income. The Scarlet Pimpernel was her first play (and third novel) and proved an enormous success in both mediums. Orczy went on to pen over a dozen sequels, as well as many other novels. She died in Oxfordshire in 1947.