Emma Magdolna Rozália Mária Jozefa Borbála “Emmuska” Orczy de Orci, or, to giver her her better known name, Baroness Orczy (1865-1947) was born in Hungary in an aristocratic family, but moved to Britain at the age of 14. She married the son of a clergyman who she had met at art school in London, Montagu Barston, in 1894. Writing was originally a side line to supplement earnings from art work, but with the production both on stage and in novel form of `The Scarlet Pimpernel’ (1903) she was to enjoy great success. The wealth generated from this was to allow her and her husband to have homes in London, Monte Carlo, and at Bearsted in Kent (see Edward Thomas).
Baroness Orczy, as the insistence on the use of her title in her work shows, was a strong supporter of conservative caused, which, at the time, embraced imperialism and militarism, and from those that remember encountering her a person who insisted on the use of the proper protocol. Yeoman’s Lane near the Green in the centre of Bearted, close to Maidstone, was the location of Snowfields, a place she and her husband bought in 1906. `Little Snowfield’, close to the main property, was built on a design commissioned by the writer and her husband by Andrew N Prentice in 1912 for a smaller property to accommodate her mother. Prentice was the same architect who had remodelled the main house soon after their purchase in 1908. Orczy showed fastidious attention to detail in her requirements for her mother’s house-to-be: ` The whole of the glass to be the best – free from bubbles, specks, waviness and all other imperfections – sprigged where necessary, and well puttied and back-puttied.” Other specifications included “paint to be composed of best white lead, pure boiled linseed oil, spirits of turpentine and colouring pigment.” The sum of £20 was allotted for two lavatories, one bath, one basin and a copper-lined sink in the pantry. The heating system cost £56 and the servants bells £5.’ (see `Little Snowfield: Listing Information’, English Heritage, https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1393851). Like H G Wells, therefore, Orczy has left more than just a memorial in words to her life in Kent, but physically changed it by constructing a house. In 1918, her mother returned to her native Hungary, apparently fearing her residence in Britain would cause problems for her daughter after the First World War. She seems to have fallen into the hands of the Bolsheviks. In 1919, her daughter moved from Snowfields to the smaller house, and in 1921 was mostly resident either in London or Monte Carlo. In the latter, she passed the Second World War, and it was here that her husband died.
Bearsted was not her only habitation in Kent. From around 1908 to 1911 she also leased Cleve Court in the small village of Acol in Thanet, on the Minster Road from at Monkton, near Thanet, apparently to import horses from her native Hungary. Acol figures as the setting of the `Nest of Sparrowhawk’ which was written there. In one of the chapter’s, `The Smith’s Forge’, she writes of how `Acol Court lies very isolated, well off the main Canterbury Road… Most of the village gossips, too, met at the local public bars, and had had up to now no time to wander as far as the Court, nor any reason to do so, seeing that Master Busy was always to be found at Prospect Inn.’ (`Nest of Sparrowhawk’, Outlook, Frankfurt am Main, 2018 edition, 241 ) `Nay,’ someone says earlier, `but your village of Acol seems full of queer folk, good Sir.’ (Ibid, 25). ` A prince who hides his identity and his person in a remote Kentish village’ were the Pimpernel-like ingredients that seem to have appealed to Orczy’s imagination. `Meadowsweet’ from 1912 also skirts around Margate.
As on political issues, Orczy had strong and clearly defined opinions on what Kent meant for her. `We rented a nice old down house near Minster, in Thanet,’ she wrote later in her life. `Thanet is not a beautiful part of England. It is flat; there are no hills, few trees, only big fields and wide spaces with the tang and smell of sea all around.’ Despite this frank assessment, she concludes: `We spent three very happy years there.’