Every generation has its share of shocking writers. Further, every generation’s shocking writing will be seen as tame by later ones, whereas things they take for granted are shocking in other ways. Elinor Glyn seems to have mostly written her books to pay the bills—her husband burned through the money she earned pretty quickly while he was alive—and the shocking books sold better than the tamer ones. While she may be seen as exemplifying the specific attitude and sexuality of the 1920s, she was already in her sixties at the time of It.
Glyn was a member of the penniless aristocracy. To be sure, some of her descent is speculative—her father might be descended from a nobleman who died centuries ago—but she’s definitely from one of those families that can tell you where their five-times-great grandparents lived. When she married, it seems to have been to another member of the same class; he had money, but he burned through it quickly. Glyn started writing relatively tame novels, but Three Weeks, a novel about a Balkan queen and her affair with a British aristocrat, sold considerably better.
Glyn herself had no few affairs. She might have based the affair in Three Weeks after her own relationship with a young British aristocrat. She had a long-term relationship with George Curzon, former Viceroy of India. She may have been older than the sort of people she mostly wrote about, but it’s impossible to say she wasn’t writing what she knew. She defined “It,” though people get her definition of “It” wrong. It wasn’t sex appeal so much as it was pure, simple charisma. It could include sex appeal, but it didn’t have to.
She’s pretty well forgotten today, I think. Even the concept of “It” isn’t talked about as much, which is strange to consider but there we are. She apparently was the person who dubbed Clara Bow “the It Girl,” and no one much talks about Clara Bow these days, either. Even I haven’t read any of Glyn’s books, though I’ve seen at least It and probably one or two of her other movies. Maybe we’ll add one of them to the Camera Obscura list; if people are up to that, let me know. Heck, they’re even in the public domain now (though my not having to pay on this one is no reason not to support my Patreon or Ko-fi!), so we can all share.
Interestingly, there are also two boats that feature in Glyn’s biography, one more tangentially than the other. The tangential one is that her sister, a fashion designer named Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon, was a survivor of the Titanic. The other is that Glyn was one of the passengers of the Oneida the weekend Thomas Ince died. She’s played by Joanna Lumley in the movie The Cat’s Meow and narrates the whole thing. She said she was sworn to secrecy about what happened, though she’s one of the people you’d figure at least wrote it down somewhere.
