Information
The dedication in the front of Baroness Orczy’s romantic novel, ‘the Nest of the Sparrowhawk’(1913), reads ‘In remembrance of the happy days I spent in Thanet…’. The creator of the Scarlet Pimpernel rented ‘a nice old dower house near Minster in Thanet’ between 1908 and 1911. This was Cleve Court in the tiny village of Acol. She used it as the background for her story, set in the Civil War, with the ingredients of intrigue, betrayal, romantic passion, disguise and blackguardery which always went down so well with her enthusiastic readers. The tree-covered Thanet of the time she described in her novel was a far cry from the open fields and exposed lanes where she and her Thanet coachman drove the five highly-strung horses she had brought over from her native Transylvania, which shied at motor cars and outraged the local schoolmaster by forcing him off his bicycle.
Quotations
The young heroine begins to see Acol Court (Cleve Court) through different eyes in the company of her mysterious foreign lover.
She had hated the grim, bare house at first, so isolated in the midst of the forests of Thanet, so like the eyrie of a bird of prey.
But now she loved the whole place; the bit of ill-kept tangled garden, with its untidy lawn and weed-covered beds, in which a few standard rose-trees strove to find a permanent home; she loved the dark and mysterious park, the rusty gate, that wood with its rich carpet which varied as each season came round.
… they walked cautiously through the park, for the moon was brilliant and outlined every object with startling vividness. The trees here were sparser. Close by was the sunk fence and the tiny rustic bridge –only a plank or two- which spanned it.
Place | Extract |
| Acol | The dedication in the front of Baroness Orczy’s romantic novel, ‘the Nest of the Sparrowhawk’(1913), reads ‘In remembrance of the happy days I spent in Thanet…’... |
| Birchington | Baroness Orczy was always keen to use places she knew well as settings for her novels and the one she wrote during her three years in Thanet, ‘The Nest of the Sparrowhawk’(1913), has as its background the area around the tiny village of Acol where she and her husband rented a house... |
