Elinor Glyn

Elinor Glyn
Portrait of Elinor Glyn
Born	Elinor Sutherland (1864-10-17)17 October 1864 Jersey, Channel Islands, United Kingdom
Died	23 September 1943(1943-09-23) (aged 78) Chelsea, London, England, United Kingdom
Pen name	Elinor Glyn
Occupation	novelist and scriptwriter
Language	English
Nationality	British
Period	1900–1940
Genre	Romance
Literary movement	Modernism
Notable works	Beyond the Rocks, Three Weeks, The Visits of Elizabeth
Spouse	Clayton Louis Glyn (m. 1892; d. 1915)
Children	2
Relatives	Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon (sister)

Elinor Glyn (née Sutherland; 17 October 1864 – 23 September 1943) was a British novelist and scriptwriter who specialised in romantic fiction that was considered scandalous for its time. She popularized the concept of It. Although her works are relatively tame by modern standards, she had tremendous influence on early 20th-century popular culture and perhaps on the careers of notable Hollywood stars such as Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson and Clara Bow in particular.

Early life and family background

Elinor Sutherland was born on 17 October 1864 in Saint Helier, Jersey, in the Channel Islands. 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. Her father was said to be related to the Lords Duffus.^[1][2]

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, Canada) with her two daughters. Here young Elinor was taught by her grandmother, Lucy Anne Saunders (née Willcocks). She was the daughter of Sir Richard Willcocks, a key figure in the early Irish police force, who had suppressed the Emmet conspiracy in 1803.^[3] 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 her reputation as an authority on style and breeding when she worked in Hollywood in the 1920s.

Glyn's elder sister grew up to be Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon, famous as a fashion designer under the name Lucile.^[4] Glyn's mother remarried in 1871 to David Kennedy, and the family returned to Jersey when Glyn was about eight years old.^[5] Her subsequent education at her stepfather's house was by governesses.^[6]

Marriage and authorhood

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.^[7] The couple had two daughters, Margot and Juliet, but the marriage foundered on mutual incompatibility.

Glyn began writing in 1900, starting with a book based on letters to her mother. Her marriage was troubled, and Glyn began having affairs with various British aristocrats. Her Three Weeks, about an exotic Balkan queen who seduces a young British aristocrat, was allegedly inspired by her affair with 16-years junior Lord Alistair Innes Ker, brother of the Duke of Roxburghe, and it scandalized Edwardian society.^[8] She had a long affair between circa 1907 and 1916 with George Nathaniel Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston.^[9] She was famously painted by society painter Philip de László at the age of 48.^[10]

As her husband fell into debt from around 1908, Glyn wrote at least one novel a year to keep up her standard of living. Her husband died in November 1915, aged 58, after several years of illness.

Writing career

This 1921 Vanity Fair caricature by Ralph Barton^[1] shows the famous people who, he imagined, left work each day in Hollywood; use cursor to identify individual figures.

1. ^ Vanity Fair magazine September 1921, accessed 2009

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. She coined the use of the word it to mean a human 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." ^[11] Her use of the word is often erroneously taken to be a euphemism for sexuality or sex appeal.

In 1919 she signed a contract with William Randolph Hearst's International Magazine Company for stories and articles that included a clause for the motion picture rights.^[12] She was brought over from England to write screenplays by the Famous Players-Lasky Production Company.^[13] 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.^[14]

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": "self-confidence and indifference as to whether you are pleasing or not".^[15] Glyn was the celebrated author of such early 20th-century bestsellers as "It",^[16] Three Weeks,^[17] Beyond the Rocks^[18] and other novels that were quite racy for the time. The screenplay of the novel It helped Glyn gain popularity as a screenwriter. However, she is only credited as an author, adapter, and co-producer on the project. She also made a cameo appearance in the film.^[13]

On the strength of the popularity and notoriety of her books, Glyn moved to Hollywood to work in the movie industry in 1920. She 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 Movement and starred Gloria Swanson. She is credited with the re-styling of 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 Gloria 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.

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.^[20] Her family 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.^[21]

Screenplays

Glyn was responsible for many screenplays in the 1920s that included Six Hours (1923), Three Weeks (The Romance of a Queen) (1923) was one of her most famous pieces about a Queen in a struggling marriage that when on vacation, has a three-week affair with a man.^[19] In addition to that, His Hour (1924), which was directed by King Vidor, Love's Blindness (1925), a movie about a marriage that is done strictly for financial reasons only, Man and Maid (1925), about a man who must choose between two different women, The Only Thing (1926), Ritzy (1927), Red Hair (1928), which was a comedy vehicle to demonstrate the passion of red-haired people, and The Price of Things (1929). 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 Movement, which was in the same genre.^[19] In 1930 she wrote her first non-silent film, called Such Men Are Dangerous, which was the last screenplay she did in the United States.^[19]

Elinor Glyn Ltd

Glyn returned home to England in 1929 in part because of tax demands. When she returned home she set out to form her own Production Company that was called Elinor Glyn Ltd. Once she had opened up her own company, she began working as a film director as well. Paying out of her own pocket, she directed Knowing Men in 1929, which showed a feminist view on men as sexual harassers. The project turned out to be a disaster, and the screenwriter Edward Knoblock sued Glyn so that the project could not be released. Elinor Glyn Ltd produced a second film in 1929, The Price of Things, which also was unsuccessful and never released. 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.^[13]

Death

Glyn died after a short illness, aged 78, on 23 September 1943 at 39 Royal Avenue, Chelsea, London,^[22] and was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium.^[23] Her ashes lie above the door to the Jewish Shrine at the west end of the columbarium.

She was survived by two daughters. Her elder daughter Margot Elinor, Lady Davson OBE, died on 10 September 1966 in Rome. She had married Sir Edward Davson, 1st Baronet (14 September 1875 – 9 August 1937) in 1921 and had two sons: Geoffrey Leo Simon Davson, who inherited his father's baronetcy (created in 1927) but changed his name to Anthony Glyn (13 March 1922 – 20 January 1998), and Christopher Davson.^[24]

Descendants

• Margot Elinor Glyn, later Margot, Lady Davson OBE (June 1893 – 10 September 1966 in Rome); 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 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.^[25] In 1946, he married his first cousin, Susan Rhys-Williams, daughter of Sir Rhys Rhys-Williams Bt. They had two daughters, Victoria and Caroline.^[26][27] The baronetcy thus passed to his younger brother, Christopher Davson.
    • Victoria
    • Caroline Glyn (née Davson) (1947 – 15 May 1981), author. 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 nun with the enclosed order of Poor Clares at the Convent of St Mary, Stroud, New South Wales, Australia.
  • Sir Christopher Michael Edward Davson, 3rd Baronet (1927–2004)
    • Sir George Trenchard Simon Davson, 4th Baronet (born 1964)
• Juliet Evangeline Glyn, later Dame Juliet Rhys-Williams DBE (1898–1964), who was a governor of the BBC from 1952 to 1956. She married (on 24 February 1921) the much older Liberal politician Sir Rhys Rhys-Williams Bt (20 October 1865 – 29 January 1955, died aged 89), MP for Banbury 1918–22, and they had two sons and two daughters.^[28] Both husband and wife abandoned the Liberal Party for the Conservative Party.
  • Sir Brandon Rhys-Williams, 2nd Baronet (14 November 1927 – 18 May 1988), MP for Kensington South 1968–74, then for Kensington 1974–88, also MEP 1973–84. By his wife Caroline Susan Foster, he had the following children, including:
    • Sir (Arthur) Gareth Ludovic Emrys Rhys-Williams, 3rd Baronet (born 1961)^[29]
  • a second son
  • Susan Rhys-Williams, who married her cousin Anthony Glyn (above) and became Lady Glyn.
  • Elspeth Rhys-Williams, later Chowdhary-Best.

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?

• 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."
• She occasionally cites 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."^[30]
• 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."
• Among the funniest of S. J. Perelman's writings is his series of pieces Cloudland Revisited, in which, as a middle-aged man, he re-reads and describes the risqué novels that had thrilled him as a youth. 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..."^[31]
• Glyn made an appearance in a 1927 Lorenz Hart song "My Heart Stood Still", from One Damn Thing After Another:

I read my Plato

Love, I thought a sin

But since your kiss

I'm reading missus Glyn!

• She makes cameo appearances as herself in the 1927 film It and in the 1928 film Show People.
• 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 Evelyn Waugh's 1952 novel Men at Arms (the first of the Sword of Honour trilogy), an (RAF) Air Marshal recites the poem 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 1954 Stanley Donen-directed film Deep in My Heart, the musical number "It" features acclaimed tap dance Ann Miller singing about Elinor Glyn and Sigmund Freud.
• 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 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 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.

Bibliography

Cover of the 1915 edition of Three Things

Notes

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Elinor Glyn

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Elinor Glyn.

• Works by Elinor Glyn at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Elinor Glyn at Internet Archive
• A 2004 essay by Louise Harrington (Cardiff University), from The Literary Encyclopedia
• Elinor Glyn at the Internet Movie Database
• Elinor Glyn at Women Film Pioneers Project
• The Elinor Glyn Papers from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
• "Historic People: Montacute's Tigress: Elinor Glyn", BBC, 11 February 2009. Retrieved 15 March 2009. (Photo by Elspeth Chowdhary-Best.)
• Papers of Elinor Glyn, Reading University Library. Retrieved 15 March 2009.
• "Love & Sin on a Tiger Skin", Time magazine, 11 July 1955.
• Anthony Glyn. Elinor Glyn: A Life. Doubleday & Company, 1955 (internet archive).
• Elinor Glyn at Virtual History.

Portraits

• Elinor Glyn painted in 1912, by commission of Lord Curzon, former Viceroy of India. Retrieved 15 March 2009.