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by Hilary A. Hallett (Author)
Unlike typical romances, which end with wedding bells, Elinor Glyn's (1864-1943) story really began after her marriage up the social ladder and into the English gentry class in 1892. Born in the Channel Islands, Elinor Sutherland, like most Victorian women, aspired only to a good match. But when her husband, Clayton Glyn, gambled their fortune away, she turned to her pen and boldly challenged the era's sexually straightjacketed literary code with her notorious succes de scandale, Three Weeks (1907). An intensely erotic tale about an unhappily married woman's sexual education of her young lover, the novel got Glyn banished from high society but went on to sell millions, revealing a deep yearning for a fuller account of sexual passion than permitted by the British aristocracy or the Anglo-American literary establishment.
In elegant prose, Hilary A. Hallett traces Glyn's meteoric rise from a depressed society darling to a world-renowned celebrity author who consorted with world leaders from St. Petersburg to Cairo to New York. After reporting from the trenches during World War I, the author was lured by American movie producers from Paris to Los Angeles for her remarkable third act. Weaving together years of deep archival research, Hallett movingly conveys how Glyn, more than any other individual during the Roaring Twenties, crafted early Hollywood's glamorous romantic aesthetic. She taught the screen's greatest leading men to make love in ways that set audiences aflame, and coined the term "It Girl," which turned actress Clara Bow into the symbol of the first sexual revolution.
With Inventing the It Girl, Hallett has done nothing less than elevate the origins of the modern romance genre to a subject of serious study. In doing so, she has also reclaimed the enormous influence of one of Anglo-America's most significant cultural tastemakers while revealing Glyn's life to have been as sensational as any of the characters she created on the page or screen. The result is a groundbreaking portrait of a courageous icon of independence who encouraged future generations to chase their desires wherever they might lead.
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Inventing the It Girl is exquisitely researched and truly addictive--a must-read for anyone beguiled by early Hollywood.
--Anne Helen Petersen
"[Elinor Glyn] brought style and sophistication to a still-parochial Hollywood. . . . How this powerhouse creature could have gone so long without due recognition is a mystery, but Hilary A. Hallett has more than corrected the oversight in this rich and riveting biography."
--Molly Haskell, author of From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies
"In Inventing the It Girl, the 'Tiger Queen' of romance fiction finally gets the serious treatment she deserves."
--Heather Clark, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
"As the rhyme goes, I would 'like to sin with Elinor Glyn', failing that, reading Hilary Hallett's joyous biography is the next best thing. Clever, irreverent, entrepreneurial, and way ahead of her time, Elinor Glyn gave women permission to explore their desires. Inventing the It Girl restores the original Queen of Romance to her rightful place in history."
--Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire
"Glamorous, sexy, enticing, brilliant, stylish, sophisticated: One quickly runs out of adjectives to describe both Elinor Glyn and the book Hilary Hallett has written about her... Glyn is blessed by having Hallett as her biographer. Her meticulous research, graceful prose, and historical insights grab and hold the reader's interest from first page to last."
--David Nasaw, author of The Last Million: Europe's Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War
"With Inventing the It Girl, Hilary A. Hallett reintroduces us to Madame Elinor Glyn, author, scenarist, and social agitator, who in the early years of the twentieth century taught a generation of women how to claim agency over their lives and desires. As Hollywood's arbiter of both good taste and sex appeal, Glyn turned Victorian moralism into sexual liberation, and the world was never the same again."
--William J. Mann, author of Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood
