ABSTRACT
The Baroness Orczy and the White Feather Foolery, Kent Messenger, 19 September 1914, However, her campaign can be allied to the circulation war between the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, and rivalries between Hodder & Stoughton, Cassell and Hutchinson, making an important contribution to publishing history. The Scarlet Pimpernel followed nationalist versions of British history in its depiction of the blue-eyed boy who saw beating foreigners as simply another game. The image of the English sportsman, so potent a part of patriotic myth, enabled Orczy to assert her hero's masculinity in the face of the complexities engendered by the figure of the Edwardian dandy. Contemporary print culture in the form of the rivalry between the Daily Express and the Daily Mail provides a further explanation. Both newspapers had nationalistic agendas, and it was only to be expected that they would vie with each other in attempts to prove their patriotism.
