Elinor Glyn (1864–1943,) née Sutherland, was a British novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter. She was known for her highly romantic tales with luxurious settings and improbable plots. She helped change attitudes about women and sex through her erotic writing.
Born in St Helier, Bailiwick of Jersey, in the Channel Islands, Glyn began writing with The Visits of Elizabeth (1900) but found fame with Three Weeks (1907,) a book that gained a reputation for being risqué. She kept her public enthralled with such books as Man and Maid (1922,) Did She? (1934,) and The Third Eye (1940.)
Glyn also worked as a war correspondent in France during World War I and was one of two women present at the signing of the Peace Treaty at Versailles in 1919.
Glyn’s novels were nonsensical, faulty in construction, and ungrammatical, but were avidly read. From 1922–27, she lived in Hollywood, where ‘it’ (her euphemism for sex appeal) was glamorized on the screen. She was responsible for the proliferation of the term ‘It Girl’ in the 1920s after using it as a euphemism for sex in her novel It.
Glyn’s autobiography is Romantic Adventure (1936.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Elinor Glyn
Romance is the glamour which turns the dust of everyday life into a golden haze.
—Elinor Glyn
Topics: Romance
Nice feelings are for people who have money to live as they please. If I had ten thousand a year, or even five, I would snap my fingers at all men, and say, ‘No, I make my life as I choose, and shall cultivate knowledge and books, and indulge in beautiful ideas of honor and exalted sentiments, and perhaps one day succumb to a noble passion.
—Elinor Glyn
The minds of some human beings are as moles, grubbing in the earth for worms. They have no eyes to see God’s sky with the stars in it.
—Elinor Glyn
He had that nameless charm, WITH a strong magnetism, which can only be called “It.”
—Elinor Glyn
Topics: Charm
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