Inventing the It Girl: How Elinor Glyn Created the Modern Romance and Conquered Early Hollywood

?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

Auteur

Hilary A. Hallett is the Mendelson Family Professor and director of American studies and associate professor of history at Columbia University. The author of Go West, Young Women! The Rise of Early Hollywood, she has written for the Los Angeles Times.

Texte du rabat

The modern romance novel is elevated to a subject of serious study in this addictively readable biography of pioneering celebrity author Elinor Glyn.

Society darling Elinor Glyn shocked her English peers with the 1907 publication of Three Weeks, an intensely erotic novel that launched her to international fame and infamy. Historian Hilary A. Hallett traces Glyn's meteoric rise for the first time, beginning where most romance novels end: with her marriage into the English gentry class in 1892.

When her husband, Clayton, gambled their fortune away, Glyn boldly became the first commercially successful writer to challenge the sexually straightjacketed literary code. As she churned out novels, she consorted with world leaders from St. Petersburg to Paris to Cairo before movie producers lured her to California in 1920. There, Glyn crafted the romantic aesthetic of Hollywood's golden Silent Age, coining the term "It”—a quality of magnetism she projected onto actresses like Clara Bow. Weaving deep archival research, Hallett presents Glyn as an icon of sexual and professional independence who would encourage new generations to chase their own desires wherever they led.