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Elinor Glyn

[glin]

Elinor Glyn (October 17, 1864 - September 23, 1943), born Elinor Sutherland, was a British novelist and scriptwriter who pioneered mass-market women's erotic fiction. She coined the use of It as a euphemism for sex appeal.

Biography

Elinor Glyn was born in Saint Helier, Jersey, Channel Islands. Following the death of her father, her mother returned to the parental home in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. Here Elinor was schooled by her grandmother, Lucy Anne Saunders nee Willcocks (an Anglo-Irish aristocrat and daughter of Sir Richard Willcocks ) in the ways of upper-class society. This training not only gave her an entrée into aristocratic circles on her return to Europe, but it led her to be considered an authority on style and breeding when she worked in Hollywood in the 1920s.

Glyn was the younger sister of Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon, famous as the fashion designer "Lucile".

She had a long lasting affair between 1906 and 1916 with George Nathaniel Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston.

Career

She pioneered mass-market women's erotic fiction, though her writing would not be considered scandalous by modern standards. She coined the use of It as a euphemism for sexuality, or sex appeal. She was the celebrated author of early 20th century bestsellers as It, Three Weeks, Beyond the Rocks, and other novels which were then considered quite racy, as tame as they might seem now.

On the strength of the popularity and notoriety of her books, Glyn moved to Hollywood to work in the movie industry. She is credited with the re-styling of Gloria Swanson from giggly starlet to elegant star. Beyond the Rocks was made into a silent film released in 1922; the Sam Wood-directed film stars Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino as a romantic pair. In 1927 she helped to make a star of actress Clara Bow for whom she coined the sobriquet "the It girl".

Apart from being a scriptwriter for the silent movie industry she had a brief career as one of the earliest female directors.

References in popular culture

A scene in Glyn's most sensational work, Three Weeks, inspired the doggerel:

Would you like to sin

With Elinor Glyn

On a tiger skin?

Or would you prefer

To err with her

On some other fur?

Glyn also makes an appearance in a 1927 Lorenz Hart song, "My Heart Stood Still" from One dam thing after another:

I read my Plato

Love, I thought a sin

But since your kiss

I'm reading missus Glyn!

In Evelyn Waugh's 1952 novel Men at Arms (the first of the Sword of Honour trilogy), an air force marshal recites the poem upon spotting a polar-bear rug by the fire (p. 125).

In Dorothy L. Sayers' Unnatural Death (1927), a woman is described: ‘Never had he met a woman in whom 'the great It', eloquently hymned by Mrs Elinor Glyn, was so completely lacking.'

In Meredith Willson's 1957 musical The Music Man, Marian Paroo, the Librarian, asks the prudish Mrs. Shinn, the mayor's wife, if she wouldn't 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 the 2001 movie 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 narrative at the beginning and the end of the film.

Reviewing Glyn's novel It, Dorothy Parker wrote of the heroine, "It, hell. She had Those."

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.