Elinor Glyn

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Not to be confused with Eleanor Glynn.

Elinor Glyn
Romance fiction
Literary movementModernism
Notable worksBeyond the Rocks, Three Weeks, The Visits of Elizabeth
Spouse
Clayton Louis Glyn
​
​
(m. 1892; died 1915)​
Children2, including
Sir Brandon Rhys-Williams, 2nd Baronet
(grandson)

Elinor Glyn (

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
.

Early life and family background

Elinor Sutherland was born on 17 October 1864 in

Lords Duffus.[2][3][a]

Her father died when she was two months old; her mother returned to the parental home in

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.

Life and career

Elinor married on 27 April 1892, at the age of 28. 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.[citation needed]

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.[citation needed]

Her marriage was troubled, and Glyn began having affairs with various British aristocrats. Her novel

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, sixteen 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][b] 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][c] 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

sex appeal.[17]

During World War I, Glyn became a war correspondent, working in France.[1] At the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, 28 June 1919, Glyn was one of only two women present.[1]

After the war, 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]

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, including Six Hours (1923) and the film version of her novel Three Weeks (1924).[19] Other films she wrote were 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. 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]

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.[23] In addition to being credited as an author, adapter, and co-producer on the 1927 film adaptation of It, she also made a cameo appearance.[21]

She is credited[

Red Hair, which was based on Glyn's 1905 novel of the same name.[24] The film was a comedy vehicle to demonstrate the supposed passion of red-haired people.[25]

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.[26] 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,[27] 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

References in popular culture
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," which Glyn published.[34]
  • 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".[35]
  • 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."[36]
  • The Sigmund Romberg comic song "It" with lyrics by Edward Smith is featured in his popular operetta The Desert Song (1926).
  • Glyn is also mentioned 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!
  • In
    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 Stanley Donen's 1954 biopic about Romberg, Deep in My Heart, the musical number "It" from the Artists and Models (revue) segment features dancer Ann Miller singing about Elinor Glyn and Sigmund Freud.
  • In 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."

Selected writings

Cover of the 1915 edition of Three Things
Elizabeth series
  1. The Visits of Elizabeth (1900)
  2. Elizabeth Visits America (1909)[11][12]
Three Weeks series
  1. Three Weeks (1907)
  2. One Day (1909) (unauthorized sequel by an anonymous author)
  3. High Noon (1910) (unauthorized sequel by an anonymous author)
The Price of Things series
  1. The Price of Things (1919), a.k.a. Family
  2. Glorious Flames (1932)
Single novels
  • The Reflections of Ambrosine (1902), a.k.a. The Seventh Commandment
  • The Damsel and the Sage (1903)
  • The Vicissitudes of Evangeline (1905), a.k.a. Red Hair
  • Beyond the Rocks (1906)
  • When the Hour Came (1910), a.k.a. His Hour, a.k.a. When His Hour Came
  • The Reason Why (1911)
  • Halcyone (1912) a.k.a. Love Itself
  • The Sequence (1913) a.k.a. Guinevere's Lover
  • The Point of View (1913)[37]
  • The Man and the Moment (1914)
  • Letters to Caroline (1914) a.k.a. Your Affectionate Godmother
  • The Career of Katherine Bush (1916)
  • Man and Maid (1922)
  • The Great Moment (1923)
  • Six Days (1924)
  • Love's Blindness (1926)
  • Knowing Men (1930)
  • The Flirt and the Flapper (1930)
  • Love's Hour (1932)
  • Sooner or Later (1933)
  • Did She? (1934)
  • The Third Eye (1940)
Story collections
  • The Contrast and Other Stories (1913)[38]
  • "It" and Other Stories (1927)[39]
  • Saint or Satyr? and Other Stories (1933) as Such Men Are Dangerous
Non-fiction
  • The Sayings of Grandmamma and Others (1908)
  • Three Things (1915)
  • Destruction (1918)
  • The Elinor Glyn System of Writing volumes 1,2,3,4 (1922)[40][41][42][43]
  • The Philosophy of Love (1923), a.k.a. Love – what I think of It
  • Letters from Spain (1924)
  • This Passion Called Love (1925)
  • The Wrinkle Book, Or, How to Keep Looking Young (1927), a.k.a. Eternal Youth
  • The Flirt and the Flapper (1930)
  • Romantic Adventure. Being the Autobiography of Elinor Glyn (1936)

Filmography

Screenwriter

Director

Notes

  1. ^ 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]
  2. ^ Their affair lasted eight-years and collapsed circa 1915–16.[13]
  3. ^ The painting is reportedly still owned by her family.[14]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Merriman, C.D. "Elinor Glyn - Biography and Works". online-literature.com. Jalic Inc. Retrieved 24 September 2022.
  2. ^ Stevenson, Jane. "Features". archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 30 July 2012. Retrieved 25 October 2019.
  3. ^ a b Glyn, Anthony (1955). Elinor Glyn. Doubleday & Co. Retrieved 18 October 2021;[page needed] Anthony Glyn was her grandson.
  4. ^ a b Outhit, Jeff (15 October 2016). "A Titanic feat: the Guelph girls who conquered the world". TheRecord.com.
  5. ^ "'Rescuing a complicated story from silence': the Willcocks brothers, Joseph and Richard". 28 February 2013.
  6. ^ Henderson, Michael. "Traitor and Knight". Retrieved 6 May 2016.
  7. ^ https://wcma.pastperfectonline.com/archive/45847070-1DE7-4124-896E-577334953500 Wellington County Archives: Saunders Family Papers
  8. ^ Glyn, Anthony, Elinor Glyn: A Biography (Hutchinson, London, 1955), p. 35.
  9. ISBN 2-940085-02-1
    .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."
  10. ^ Lady Angela Forbes, Memories and Base Details (1921), p. 79
  11. ^ a b Glyn, Elinor (1909). Elizabeth Visits America. B. Tauchnitz.
  12. ^
    gutenberg.org
    . Retrieved 24 September 2022.
  13. ^ a b "Historic People: Montacute's Tigress: Elinor Glyn" BBC, 11 February 2009. Retrieved 15 March 2009.
  14. ^ a b Jssgallery.org Archived 12 May 2008 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 15 March 2008.
  15. ^ "A love affair at Montacute House". 23 March 2018.
  16. ^ Elinor Glyn (1927) "It", Paramount Pictures
  17. ISSN 0270-5346
    .
  18. Vanity Fair
    . September 1922. Retrieved 27 June 2017.
  19. ^ a b c d e "Elinor Glyn Biography". imdb.com. Retrieved 1 December 2014.
  20. ISBN 978-1-4724-2182-1
    .
  21. ^ a b c "Elinor Glynn Facts". biography.yourdictionary.com. Retrieved 1 December 2014.
  22. ^ Weedon, Alexis, "Elinor Glyn's System of Writing", Publishing History, vol. 60, pp. 31–50, 2006.
  23. ^ Barnett, Vincent L., "Picturization partners: Elinor Glyn and the Thalberg contract affair", Film History, vol. 19, no. 3, 2007.
  24. gutenberg.org
    . Retrieved 24 September 2022.
  25. ^ source?
  26. ^ Barnett & Weedon (2014). Elinor Glyn as Novelist, Movie-maker, Glamour Icon and Businesswoman. pp. 42, 89.
  27. ISBN 0-19-861372-5
    .
  28. ^ "Death Announcements (D to G), London Times", p. 3 (Archived 26 March 2009 at the Wayback Machine). Retrieved 15 March 2009.
  29. ^ "Books: Love & Sin on a Tiger Skin". Time. 11 July 1955. Archived from the original on 15 December 2008. Retrieved 23 July 2013.
  30. ^ G. Chowdharay-Best. [sic: G. Chowdhury-Best]. "Anthony Glyn" (obituary), The Independent (as archived in findarticles.com), 10 February 1998.
  31. ^ Sarah Lyall. "Sir Anthony Glyn, 75, Author Known for Spirit and Diversity", The New York Times, 28 January 1998.
  32. ^ Papers of Juliet Rhys-Williams, British Library of Political and Economic Science. Retrieved 15 March 2009.
  33. ^ Burke's Peerage: Rhys-Williams. Retrieved 15 March 2009.
  34. ^ Schmidt, Barbara. "Mark Twain Interview with Elinor Glyn". twain quotes. Archived from the original on 22 November 2006. Retrieved 24 September 2022.
  35. ^ Glyn, Elinor (1922), Man and Maid, Philadelphia: Lippincott, p. 125 Man and Maid in libraries (WorldCat catalog).
  36. ^ 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).
  37. gutenberg.org
    . Retrieved 24 September 2022.
  38. ^ Glyn, Elinor (1913). The Contrast and Other Stories. B. Tauchnitz. Retrieved 24 September 2022.
  39. ^ Glyn, Elinor (1927). "It" and Other Stories. B. Tauchnitz. Retrieved 24 September 2022.
  40. ^ Glyn, Elinor (1922). The Elinor Glyn System of Writing 1. Authors' Press. Retrieved 24 September 2022.
  41. ^ Glyn, Elinor (1922). The Elinor Glyn System of Writing 2. Authors' Press.
  42. ^ Glyn, Elinor (1922). The Elinor Glyn System of Writing 3. Authors' Press.
  43. ^ Glyn, Elinor (1922). The Elinor Glyn System of Writing 4. Authors' Press.

Further reading

External links

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