My Official Wife
My Official Wife is a popular adventure novel from 1891 written by Richard Henry Savage. He drafted it in 1890 while recovering in New York from an illness and then expanded it into a full book. It was published in May 1891 and quickly became a bestseller, translated into many languages (though not Russian). The Times praised it as a clever, entertaining tour de force.
Plot in simple terms: Colonel Arthur Lenox travels with a beautiful woman who pretends to be his wife and passes the Russian border as Mrs. Lenox. In St. Petersburg, Helene, the “official wife,” is a dangerous Nihilist who is trying to assassinate the Emperor. Lenox learns her true nature and fears discovery, while Helene befriends a Russian officer and escapes. Meanwhile the real wife arrives from Paris, creating a tangle with the police. Lenox tries to protect his wife and uses a threat to expose police inefficiency to help them.
The story was adapted for the stage by Archibald Clavering Gunter. It first ran in Utica, New York, in November 1892, and then opened on Broadway at the Standard Theatre on January 23, 1893, with Minnie Seligman as Helene. The Broadway run lasted about three weeks and critics were not impressed, though it drew large crowds. A German version titled Die Officielle Frau was censored in Vienna and later shown in Munich. The English stage authors B. C. Stephenson and William Yardley credited the novel as an inspiration for their 1895 play The Passport.
Film adaptations followed: a 1914 silent film by Vitagraph Studios, directed by James Young, starring Clara Kimball Young, Harry T. Morey, and Rose E. Tapley; a 1926 silent film directed by Paul L. Stein starring Irene Rich and Conway Tearle; and a 1936 German film Eskapade (also known as Seine Offizielle Frau or Gehemagentin Helene), directed by Erich Waschneck and featuring Renate Müller, Georg Alexander, and Walter Franck.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 21:59 (CET).