As always, masculine secret-identity heroes have underestimated the fair sex.

No, I don't mean the Lois Lanes of the superhero worlds. I'm talking about the woman who created the whole dual-persona genre more than 100 years ago.

And another woman is carrying it on today as witness one of the current productions of Abingdon's Barter Theatre.

Don Diego seemed to be a clueless, flower-sniffing romantic in all the incarnations of Zorro, dating back to Johnston McCulley's original stories and continuing through movies (from silents to serials to big-screen productions) and TV. Clark Kent started out being hopelessly inept, to the point where Lois originally thought him a spineless worm compared with Superman. Bruce Wayne and Lamont Cranston were socialite playboys, whom nobody would have identified with Batman or The Shadow. Peter Parker was a studious nerd, nothing like the web-slinging crime-fighter called Spider-Man.

And on and on, but where did it all start?

Well, it turns out to have started in 1904 when Baroness Emmuska Orczy's play, "The Scarlet Pimpernel," hit the London stage. The native Hungarian began writing after she married in 1894. While on a trip to France with her husband, she became interested in the history of the French Revolution with its Reign of Terror and came up with the concept of a character called The Scarlet Pimpernel (named for an English flower, which he used as his trademark) who rescued French nobles from the guillotine.

The French couldn't catch him because they couldn't figure out who he was. He was really Sir Percy Blakeney, a rich Englishman who deliberately portrayed himself as a clueless fop.

Orczy put it in a novel, but publishers weren't interested. So she adapted it to the stage where it was a hit -- playing more than 2,000 performances. The publishers reconsidered -- not only that first novel, but 11 sequels as well!

My first encounter with the character was in a Sunday radio series, to which I would listen just before "Our Miss Brooks" and "Jack Benny." I didn't know until looking it up recently that it had been a summer replacement show in the early 1950s imported from England with Marius Goring voicing the role.

For the short time it was on the air, it obviously made an impression on me. It would be years later before I would see probably the best-known movie version, thanks to videotape, made in 1934 with Leslie Howard as Sir Percy and Raymond Massey as his archenemy, Chauvelin.

The radio series kept strictly to the "Mission: Impossible" adventures in which the Pimpernel outsmarted the Frenchies every week. But when I discovered a paperback edition of the novel while in college, I found the point-of-view character was really Blakeney's wife, Marguerite, a native Frenchwoman whose loyalties are torn between her family and her husband. Since he is uncertain of her loyalties, he keeps his secret from her, too, and she is left wondering what happened to the man she married.

Now that viewpoint is being reflected again in the newest incarnation, a musical version at Barter (hey, if they can do musicals about Superman and Sherlock Holmes, they can do this). And, surprise, it is also by a woman.

Contacted by e-mail, Nan Knighton sees the story as all about romance.

"And what could be more romantic than a vapid husband who turns out to be a dashing hero? Wouldn't this be every married woman's fantasy? Your husband is not really the unbearably predictable guy who works every day, comes home, eats, belches and hits the bed, snoring. He has a secret life; he has unplumbed mysterious depths, and any day now he will emerge as a hero who sweeps you off your feet into a new life where not one moment is predictable. I think the Baroness naturally fed into this fantasy," Knighton said.

"However," she continued, "another aspect of the female fantasy is the desire to herself be the adventurer. Particularly in the Baroness's day, most women were confined to a purely domestic life, but the souls of so many longed for the exciting avenues open to men. I think about the many reported cases of women in the Civil War who disguised themselves as men so they could be soldiers and plunge into the fray. From this vantage point, it is not so surprising that a woman would write a swashbuckling book -- it enabled her to vicariously live the life of a man, a super-man. And indeed, this may have been the stronger fantasy for the Baroness, as she so scrupulously did her historical research and so consistently set her books during the bloody revolution."

Men did seem to take over the dual-identity genre, she conceded, "and I think this is why we see less and less true romanticism in it as time goes on. 'Batman' and 'Spider-Man' movies are focused primarily on the male action, the good guy versus bad guy scenario, and the sardonic, ironic touches within the set-up. There's always the woman in the background who doesn't suspect the real identity, but it is not her story, and it's frankly going to appeal a little more to him than to her."

In the Barter play, which continues through Nov. 19, the woman becomes a pivotal character in the dual-identity genre once more. Knighton even has her take part in the final duel. Zorro, eat your heart out.

For more information, go on the Web to www.nanknighton.com and www.bartertheatre.com.

Paul Dellinger has been a reporter with The Roanoke Times for 40 years.