Elinor Glyn

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EG , a highly prolific and popular twentieth-century romance novelist, also wrote comedies of manners, and screenplays (mostly for silent films). The sexual candour of her novels shocked her Edwardian public: she became particularly known for her term It—meaning personal sexual magnetism—and for her novella and silent film of that title. Over the course of her career, she wrote more than forty novels, adapted eight of them for film (all but two silent), as well as three volumes of short stories, three successive volumes on her thoughts and theories about love, and one on her writing process. During World War One, she wrote French propaganda for US journals, and throughout her career she wrote articles on love, fashion, beauty, and etiquette for magazines such as Cosmopolitan. She kept a journal throughout her life, but never published it. Her novels depict female sensuality and, often, illicit love affairs between older, dominant women and younger, impressionable men. Most of her central figures either come from the upper class, or climb the social ladder by marriage or good luck. EG 's writing is drenched in her romantic notion of love, which she saw as overwhelming, uncontrollable, passionate, sensual, selfless, idealistic, and chivalrous. In her fiction lovers often triumph over impossible situations before consummating their love. Her represention of female sensuality is compatible with advising women: Be elusive—always.
Glyn, Anthony. Elinor Glyn. Hutchinson, 1968.
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Etherington-Smith, Meredith, and Jeremy Pilcher. The "It" Girls. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.
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Black and white photo of Elinor Glyn from the waist up. She is wearing drop ear-rings, a fur hat, and a fur-trimmed coat over a suit. Her hands are in a fur muff. Her hair is short, in luxuriant curls. Her gaze is directed at the viewer.
"Elinor Glyn" Retrieved from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/70/Elinor_Glyn%2C_portrait_bust_LCCN2014680673.jpg/745px-Elinor_Glyn%2C_portrait_bust_LCCN2014680673.jpg. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication license. This work is in the public domain.

Milestones

17 October 1864
Elinor Sutherland (later Elinor Glyn) was born in Jersey (one of the Channel Islands), three months before her father died of typhoid in Italy.
Glyn, Elinor. Romantic Adventure. E. P. Dutton, 1937.
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Hardwick, Joan. Addicted to Romance: The Life and Adventures of Elinor Glyn. Andre Deutsch, 1994.
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June 1907
EG 's own longing for passion and romance and frustration with her marriage inspired her to write her hugely successful romance novel Three Weeks—which she wrote from start to finish in six weeks.
Glyn, Elinor. Romantic Adventure. E. P. Dutton, 1937.
129, 134
Glyn, Anthony. Elinor Glyn. Hutchinson, 1968.
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Beaton, Cecil, and Elinor Glyn. “Introduction”. Three Weeks, Duckworth, 1974, p. v - xxvii.
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23 September 1943
EG died at 39 Royal Avenue, Chelsea, after a week in hospital, from an undetermined illness.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Hardwick, Joan. Addicted to Romance: The Life and Adventures of Elinor Glyn. Andre Deutsch, 1994.
284

Biography

Birth and Family

17 October 1864
Elinor Sutherland (later Elinor Glyn) was born in Jersey (one of the Channel Islands), three months before her father died of typhoid in Italy.
Glyn, Elinor. Romantic Adventure. E. P. Dutton, 1937.
9
Hardwick, Joan. Addicted to Romance: The Life and Adventures of Elinor Glyn. Andre Deutsch, 1994.
6