Elinor Glyn (néeSutherland; 17 October 1864 – 23 September 1943) was a British novelist and scriptwriter who specialised in romantic fiction, which was considered scandalous for its time, although her works are relatively tame by modern standards. She popularized the concept of the it-girl, and had tremendous influence on early 20th-century popular culture and, possibly, on the careers of notable Hollywood stars such as Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson and, especially, Clara Bow.
Elinor Sutherland was born on 17 October 1864 in Saint Helier, Jersey, in the Channel Islands.[1] She was the younger daughter of Douglas Sutherland (1838–1865), a civil engineer of Scottish descent, and his wife Elinor Saunders (1841–1937), of an Anglo-French family that had settled in Canada.[1] Her father was said to be related to the Lords Duffus.[2][3][lower-alpha 1]
Her father died when she was two months old; her mother returned to the parental home in Guelph, in what was then Upper Canada, British North America (now Ontario) with her two daughters.[4] Here, young Elinor was taught by her grandmother, Lucy Anne Saunders (née Willcocks), daughter of Sir Richard Willcocks, a magistrate in the early Irish police force, who helped to suppress the Emmet Rising in 1803.[5][6] Richard's brother Joseph also settled in Upper Canada, publishing one of the first opposition papers there, pursuing liberty, and dying a rebel in 1814. The Anglo-Irish grandmother instructed young Elinor in the ways of upper-class society. This training not only gave her an entrée into aristocratic circles on her return to Europe, it also led to her reputation as an authority on style and breeding when she worked in Hollywood in the 1920s. Her grandfather on her mother's side, Thomas Saunders (1795-1873) was a direct descendant of the Saunders family who had possessed Pitchcott Manor in Buckinghamshire for several centuries.[7]
The family lived in Guelph for seven years at a stone home that still stands near the University of Guelph.[4] Glyn's mother remarried in 1871 to David Kennedy, and the family returned to Jersey when Glyn was about eight years old.[8] Her subsequent education at her stepfather's house was by governesses.[1] Glyn's elder sister grew up to be Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon, famous as a fashion designer under the name Lucile.
Marriage and career
At the age of 28, the green-eyed, red-haired but dowryless Elinor married on 27 April 1892. Her husband was Clayton Louis Glyn (13 July 1857 – 10 November 1915), a wealthy but spendthrift barrister and Essex landowner who was descended from Sir Richard Carr Glyn, an 18th-century Lord Mayor of London.[9] The couple had two daughters, Margot and Juliet, but the marriage foundered on mutual incompatibility.
Glyn began writing in 1900, starting with Visits of Elizabeth, serialised in The World,[1] a book based on letters to her mother, although Lady Angela Forbes claimed, in her memoirs, that Glyn used her as the prototype of Elizabeth.[10] As Glyn's husband fell into debt from around 1908, she wrote at least one novel a year to keep up her standard of living.
Her marriage was troubled, and Glyn began having affairs with various British aristocrats. Her novel Three Weeks, about an exotic Balkan queen who seduces a young British aristocrat, was allegedly inspired by her affair with Lord Alistair Innes Ker, brother of the Duke of Roxburghe,16-years her junior, which scandalized Edwardian society.[1]
Around 1907, Glyn toured the United States, resulting in her book Elizabeth visits America (1909).[1][11][12]
Glyn had a long affair between circa 1907 and 1916 with Lord Curzon, the former Viceroy of India.[13][lower-alpha 2] Society painter Philip de László painted her in 1912, when she was 48. Curzon is presumed to have commissioned it and had given Glyn the sapphires she wears in the portrait.[14][lower-alpha 3] In 1915, Curzon leased Montacute House, in South Somerset, for him and Glyn, now a widow as her husband had died that autumn at the age of 58 after several years of illness. Curzon asked Glyn to decorate Montacute House and with Glyn away from London, Curzon courted heiress Grace Duggan. Glyn learned of Curzon and Duggan's engagement from the morning papers and burnt 500 love letters in the bedroom fireplace, never speaking to Curzon again.[15]
Glyn pioneered risqué, and sometimes erotic, romantic fiction aimed at a female readership, a radical idea for its time—though her writing is not scandalous by modern standards. In her novel The Man and the Moment (1914),[1] she coined the use of the word it to mean a characteristic that "draws all others with magnetic force. With 'IT' you win all men if you are a woman–and all women if you are a man. 'IT' can be a quality of the mind as well as a physical attraction."[16] Her use of the word is often erroneously taken to simply be a euphemism for sexuality or sex appeal.[17]
This 1922 Vanity Fair caricature by Ralph Barton shows the famous people who, he imagined, left work each day in Hollywood; use cursor to identify individual figures.
After the death of her husband and separation from Curzon, Glyn went to Hollywood, for the filming of her novel, The Great Moment.[1][19]
In 1919, she signed a contract with William Randolph Hearst's International Magazine Company to write stories and articles that included a clause for the motion picture rights.[20] She was brought over from England to write screenplays by the Famous Players-Lasky Production Company.[21] She wrote for Cosmopolitan and other Hearst press titles, advising women on how to keep their men and imparting health and beauty tips. The Elinor Glyn System of Writing (1922) gives insights into writing for Hollywood studios and magazine editors of the time.[22]
From the 1927 novel, "It":
To have "It," the fortunate possessor must have that strange magnetism which attracts both sexes.... In the animal world "It" demonstrates in tigers and cats—both animals being fascinating and mysterious, and quite unbiddable.
From the 1927 movie, "It" is described as, "self-confidence and indifference as to whether you are pleasing or not."[23] In addition to It Glyn was the celebrated author of such early 20th-century bestsellers as Three Weeks,[24]Beyond the Rocks[25] and other novels that were quite racy for the time.[26] The screenplay of the novel It helped Glyn gain popularity as a screenwriter. However, althought she is only credited as an author, adapter, and co-producer on the project, she also made a cameo appearance in the film.[21]
She is credited[who?] with the re-styling of Gloria Swanson from giggly starlet to elegant star. The duo connected again when Beyond the Rocks was made into a silent film that was released in 1922. The Sam Wood directed film stars Swanson and Rudolph Valentino as a romantic pair. In 1927, Glyn helped to make a star of actress Clara Bow, for whom she coined the sobriquet "the It girl." In 1928, Bow also starred in Red Hair, which was based on Glyn's 1905 novel of the same name.[27]
Screenplays
Glyn was one of the most famous women screenwriters in the 1920s. She has 28 story or screenwriting credits, three producing credits, and two credits for directing.[19] Her first script was called The Great Moment and starred Gloria Swanson.
Glyn was responsible for many screenplays in the 1920s that included Six Hours (1923). Three Weeks (1924) was one of her most famous pieces about a queen in a struggling marriage who, while on vacation, has a three-week affair.[19] In addition to this film, she wrote His Hour (1924), directed by King Vidor; Love's Blindness (1926), about a marriage that is done strictly for financial reasons; Man and Maid (1925), about a man who must choose between two women; The Only Thing (1925); and Ritzy (1927). Red Hair, a comedy vehicle to demonstrate the passion of red-haired people [28] was followed by The Price of Things in 1930. Three screenplays based on Glyn's novels and a story in the mid to late twenties, Man and Maid, The Only Thing, and Ritzy, did not do well at the box office, despite the success Glyn gained with her first project, The Great Moment, which was in the same genre.[19] In 1930 she wrote her first non-silent film, Such Men Are Dangerous, her last screenplay in the United States.[19]
Elinor Glyn Ltd
Apart from being a scriptwriter for the silent movie industry, working for both MGM and Paramount Pictures in Hollywood in the mid-1920s, she had a brief career as one of the earliest female directors.[29]
Glyn returned home to England in 1929 in part because of tax demands. With her return she set out to form her own production company, Elinor Glyn Ltd. Her family had established a company in 1924, Elinor Glyn Ltd, to which she signed her copyrights, receiving an income from the firm and an annuity in later life. The firm was an early pioneer of cross-media branding.[30] After she started the company, she began working as a film director as well. Paying out of her own pocket, she directed Knowing Men in 1930, which showed a more traditionalist view of men as sexual harassers. The project was a disaster, and the screenwriter Edward Knoblock sued Glyn so that the work could not be released. Elinor Glyn Ltd produced a second film in 1930, The Price of Things, which was also unsuccessful and was never released in the US. As her company failed and she exhausted her finances, Glyn decided to retire from film work and instead focus on her first passion, writing novels.[21]
Death
After a short illness, Glyn died on 23 September 1943, at 39 Royal Avenue, Chelsea, London, aged 78,[31] and was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium. Her ashes lie above the door to the Jewish Shrine at the west end of the columbarium.
Descendants
Margot Elinor Glyn, later Margot, Lady Davson OBE (June 1893 – 10 September 1966 in Rome);[32] she married Sir Edward Rae Davson, 1st Baronet (14 September 1875 – 9 August 1937) in 1921 and had two sons:
Anthony Glyn (13 March 1922 – 20 January 1998), author, previously Sir Geoffrey Leo Simon Davson, 2nd Baronet. He was born Geoffrey Leo Simon Davson, but he changed his name to Anthony Geoffrey Ian Simon Glyn by deed poll in 1957. In 1937, at the age of 15, he inherited his father's baronetcy (created in 1927) and became known as Sir Geoffrey Davson, 2nd Baronet. He was a prolific writer and in 1955 he published an entertaining if tactful biography of his maternal grandmother, Elinor Glyn.[33] In 1946, he married his first cousin, Susan Rhys-Williams, daughter of Sir Rhys Rhys-Williams Bt. They had two daughters, Victoria and Caroline.[34][35] The baronetcy thus passed to his younger brother, Christopher Davson.
Victoria
Caroline Glyn (née Davson) (27 August 1947 – 15 May 1981), novelist, poet, and artist. Her first novel, Don't Knock the Corners Off, was published in 1963 when she was 15. At the age of 20, she became a contemplative nun with the enclosed order of Poor Clares at Community of St. Clare, Freeland, Oxfordshire, later helping to found a new monastery in Stroud, New South Wales, Australia. In the convent she continued to publish and to create artworks.
In his autobiography, Mark Twain describes the time he met Glyn, when they had a wide-ranging and frank discussion of "nature's laws" and other matters not "to be repeated," which Glyn published.[38]
She occasionally cited herself in the third person in her own books, as in Man and Maid (1922), when she has a character refer to "that 'It'" as something "Elinor Glyn writes of in her books".[39]
In the 1923 film The Ten Commandments, one title card says: "Nobody believes in these Commandment things nowadays—and I think Elinor Glyn's a lot more interesting."
In the 1925 film Stella Dallas, at around 1 hour and 2 minutes into the film, the following title appears: "For a woman with all her money she's got rotten taste in books. And me dying for Elinor Glyn's latest!"
In S. J. Perelman's series of pieces Cloudland Revisited, as a middle-aged man, he re-reads and describes the risqué novels that had thrilled him as a youth. The essay "Tuberoses and Tigers" deals with Glyn's Three Weeks. Perelman described it as "servant-girl literature", and called Glyn's style "marshmallow". He also mentions a film version of the book made by Samuel Goldwyn in 1924, in which Aileen Pringle starred. Perelman recalled Goldwyn's "seductive" image of Pringle "lolling on a tiger skin."[40]
The Sigmund Romberg comic song "It" with lyrics by Edward Smith is featured in his popular operetta The Desert Song (1926).
Dorothy L. Sayers' writes in her novel Unnatural death (1927 "Never had he met a woman in whom 'the great "It"', eloquently hymned by Mrs Elinor Glyn, was so completely lacking."
In Evelyn Waugh's 1952 novel Men at Arms (the first of the Sword of Honour trilogy), an (RAF) Air Marshal recites the poem (above) upon spotting a polar bear rug by the fire in a London club, of which he has just wangled membership (p.125). To this, another member responds, "Who the hell is Elinor Glyn?" The Air Marshal replies, "Oh, just a name, you know, put in to make it rhyme." This was both a snub to the Air Marshal and a literary snubbing of Glyn by Waugh.
In the 1962 film version of Meredith Willson's musical The Music Man, Marian Paroo the librarian asks the prudish Mrs Shinn, the mayor's wife, if she would not rather have her daughter reading the classic Persian poetry of Omar Khayyam than Elinor Glyn, to which Mrs Shinn replies: "What Elinor Glyn reads is her mother's problem!"
In Upstairs, Downstairs, after Elizabeth Bellamy's disastrous marriage, she meets a new lover, the social-climber Julius Karekin. After a passionate night, he sleeps while she reads part of Chapter XI of Three Weeks aloud.
In the 2001 film The Cat's Meow, Elinor Glyn, played by Joanna Lumley, is one of the guests aboard William Randolph Hearst's yacht on the fateful weekend Thomas Ince died. Lumley, as Glyn, provides voice-over narration at the beginning and end of the film.
In season five, episode three of Downton Abbey (set in 1924), the character Tom Branson refers to the scandalous nature of Elinor Glyn's novels.
In Chapter 2 of The Women by Hilton Als (1996), which discusses Dorothy Dean, Als juxtaposes Dean with Glyn. Als writes, "This perceived antagonism with heterosexual men provided Dean with the resistance she needed to argue against her conventional fantasy of being someone's girlfriend, someone's Lady Glyn."
↑ The Sutherlands were descended from David Sutherland, Laird of Cambusavie, allegedly a son of Alexander Sutherland, a younger brother of the Jacobite 3rd Lord Duffus, who is described in The Scots Peerage as having died without issue. The fact that the 6th Lord Duffus inherited in 1827 over the now Canadian Sutherlands, who sold their estates in the 1770s to the Earl of Sutherland, probably means that the relationship was more distant, or if the same, that the Laird of Cambusavie was illegitimate.[3]
↑ Their affair lasted eight-years and collapsed circa 1915–16.[13]
↑ The painting is reportedly still owned by her family.[14]
Related Research Articles
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Beyond the Rocks is a 1922 American silent romantic drama film directed by Sam Wood, starring Rudolph Valentino and Gloria Swanson. It is based on the 1906 novel of the same name by Elinor Glyn. Beyond the Rocks was long considered lost but a nitrate print of the film was discovered in the Netherlands in 2003. The film was restored and released on DVD by Milestone Film & Video in 2006.
Soul Mates is a surviving 1925 American silent drama film directed by Jack Conway, based on the 1911 novel The Reason Why by Elinor Glyn. The movie was the second successful collaboration between Glyn and Conway.
Man and Maid is a lost 1925 drama film directed by Victor Schertzinger based on a 1922 novel by Elinor Glyn. The film stars Lew Cody, Renée Adorée and Harriet Hammond.
Elizabeth Knollys, Lady Leighton, was an English courtier who served Queen Elizabeth I of England, first as a Maid of Honour and secondly, after 1566, as a Gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber. Knollys was the grand-niece of Queen consort Anne Boleyn, which made her a cousin once removed of the Queen. Elizabeth married Sir Thomas Leighton of Feckenham in Worcestershire in 1578. He served as Governor of Jersey and Guernsey.
Three Weeks is a 1907 erotic romance novel by Elinor Glyn.
Three Week-Ends is a 1928 American comedy drama film directed by Clarence G. Badger and starring Clara Bow and Neil Hamilton. It is believed lost. "Three Week-Ends" is the title given in the AFI Catalog of Feature Films, with alternate titles being "Three Week Ends" and "3 Weekends".
Mad Hour is a 1928 American silent drama film directed by Joseph Boyle and starring Sally O'Neil, Alice White and Donald Reed. It was adapted from a 1914 novel by Elinor Glyn.
Sir Edward Rae Davson, 1st Baronet, was a British businessman who was influential in colonial economics. He was the managing director of Messrs. S. Davson & Co., Ltd., a prominent West Indies merchant firm.
↑ Glyn, Anthony, Elinor Glyn: A Biography (Hutchinson, London, 1955), p. 35.
↑ Burke's Peerage and Baronetage, 106th Edition, Volume 1. Burke's (Genealogical Books) Ltd. 1999. p.1161. ISBN2-940085-02-1.Family history of Glyn Baronets. His wife is simply described as: "Elinor (d[ied] 23 Sep[tember] 1943), y[ounge]r dau[ghter] of Douglas Sutherland, of Toronto."
↑ Lady Angela Forbes, Memories and Base Details (1921), p. 79
↑ Glyn, Elinor (1922), Man and Maid, Philadelphia: Lippincott, p. 125 Man and Maid in libraries (WorldCat catalog).
↑ Perelman, S. J. (1949), Listen to the Mocking Bird, pp. 70–78, London: Reinhardt and Evans Listen to the Mocking Bird in libraries (WorldCat catalog).
Hallett, Hilary A. (2022). Inventing the It Girl: How Elinor Glyn Created the Modern Romance and Conquered Early Hollywood. New York: Liveright. ISBN9781631490699.
Barnett, Vincent L.; Weedon, Alexis (29 April 2016). Elinor Glyn as Novelist, Moviemaker, Glamour Icon and Businesswoman. Routledge. ISBN978-1-317-14514-1.
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