Elinor Glyn (née Sutherland; 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.
Contents
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.
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. 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. 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.
The family lived in Guelph for seven years at a stone home that still stands near the University of Guelph. Glyn's mother remarried in 1871 to David Kennedy, and the family returned to Jersey when Glyn was about eight years old. Her subsequent education at her stepfather's house was by governesses. 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. 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, 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. 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 a 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.
Around 1907, Glyn toured the United States, resulting in her book Elizabeth visits America (1909).
Glyn had a long affair between circa 1907 and 1916 with Lord Curzon, the former Viceroy of India. 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. 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.
Glyn pioneered risqué, and sometimes erotic, romantic fiction aimed at a female readership, a radical idea for its time. In her novel The Man and the Moment (1914), 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." Her use of the word is often erroneously taken to simply be a euphemism for sexuality or sex appeal.
Death
After a short illness, Glyn died on 23 September 1943, at 39 Royal Avenue, Chelsea, London, aged 78, 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); 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. In 1946, he married his first cousin, Susan Rhys-Williams, daughter of Sir Rhys Rhys-Williams Bt. They had two daughters, Victoria and Caroline. 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.
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 (24 February 1921) the much older Liberal politician Sir Rhys Rhys-Williams Bt (20 October 1865 – 29 January 1955, aged 89), MP for Banbury 1918–22, and they had two sons and two daughters. 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:
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," which Glyn published.
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".
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."
The Sigmund Romberg comic song "It" with lyrics by Edward Smith is featured in his popular operetta The Desert Song (1926).
Selected writings
Elizabeth series
The Visits of Elizabeth (1900)
Elizabeth Visits America (1909)
Three Weeks series
Three Weeks (1907)
One Day (1909) (unauthorized sequel by an anonymous author)
High Noon (1910) (unauthorized sequel by an anonymous author)
The Price of Things series
The Price of Things (1919), a.k.a. Family
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)
The Man and the Moment (1914)
Filmography
Three Weeks, directed by Perry N. Vekroff (1914, based on the novel Three Weeks)
One Day, directed by Hal Clarendon (1916, based on the novel One Day)
One Hour, directed by Edwin L. Hollywood and Paul McAllister (1917, sequel to the novel Three Weeks)
Három het, directed by Márton Garas (Hungary, 1917, based on the novel Three Weeks)
The Reason Why, directed by Robert G. Vignola (1918, based on the novel The Reason Why)
The Man and the Moment, directed by Arrigo Bocchi (UK, 1918, based on the novel The Man and the Moment)
A Sphynx, directed by Béla Balogh (Hungary, 1918, based on the novel When the Hour Came)
The Career of Katherine Bush, directed by Roy William Neill (1919, based on the novel The Career of Katherine Bush)
Halcyone, directed by Alfréd Deésy (Hungary, 1919, based on the novel Halcyone)
Érdekházasság, directed by Antal Forgács (Hungary, 1919, based on the novel The Reason Why)
Beyond the Rocks, directed by Sam Wood (1922, based on the novel Beyond the Rocks)
Six Days, directed by Charles Brabin (1923, based on the novel Six Days)
Three Weeks, directed by Alan Crosland (1924, based on the novel Three Weeks)
Screenwriter
1921: The Great Moment (dir. Sam Wood)
1922: The World's a Stage (dir. Colin Campbell)
1924: How to Educate a Wife (dir. Monta Bell)
1925: The Only Thing (dir. Jack Conway)
1927: Ritzy (dir. Richard Rosson)
1928: Three Weekends (dir. Clarence G. Badger)
1930: Such Men Are Dangerous (dir. Kenneth Hawks)
Director
Knowing Men (UK, 1930)
The Price of Things (UK, 1930)