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

by Hilary A. Hallett

Overview

“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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631490699
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	07/26/2022
Pages:	464
Product dimensions:	9.30(w) x 6.40(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

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 and Slate.

Table of Contents

Prologue On Flappers and Their Philosophers 1

Act I Beauty

Chapter 1 In the Library, Jersey, the Channel Islands, 1880 11

Chapter 2 A Gentleman's Wife 24

Chapter 3 In Sickness and in Health 48

Chapter 4 Marry the Life, Not the Man 76

Chapter 5 Under Foreign Skies 93

Act II Glamour

Chapter 6 Writing Three Weeks 119

Chapter 7 Trash 132

Chapter 8 The Word Became Flesh 162

Chapter 9 Surviving the Worst 189

Chapter 10 World Split in Two 218

Act III Power

Chapter 11 At the Hollywood Hotel 241

Chapter 12 Babylon or Bohemia? 267

Chapter 13 The Elinor Glyn Touch 296

Chapter 14 Family Fortunes 329

Chapter 15 The It Girl 355

Epilogue Afterlives of a Tiger Queen 378

Acknowledgments 387

Notes 391

Illustration credits 433

Index 435

Editorial Reviews

★ 2022-05-10
A terrific biography of a revolutionary 19th-century British author and sexual trailblazer.

Inspired by her dissertation on “the sexual politics of early Hollywood,” Hallett, a history professor and director of American studies at Columbia, rediscovers the overlooked literary legacy of Elinor Glyn (1864-1943). Born in the Channel Islands, she was raised by her grandmother, who molded her in the ways of British aristocracy. Despite an awareness of 19th-century “wifely duty” and Victorian ideals, Glyn’s early “mistrust of womanly submission ran deep.” As an adult, she bedazzled society circles with her bright red hair and green eyes. She married a wealthy landowner, birthed two daughters, and traveled extensively across Europe and Egypt, journeys the author describes in pleasingly lavish detail. A “sexual and temperamental mismatch” sunk the marriage, but not before Glyn began straying with assorted men and penning feverishly scandalous novels in the early 1900s. In time, she would become known as the “founder of the modern sex novel,” even amid the strict media and censorship rules of the era. Indifferent to ostracism from naysaying British society, she defiantly continued publishing erotically focused books—including Three Weeks (1907), a massive bestseller that was translated into “every major European language”—featuring her cultural touchstone Tiger Queen, a temptress character known for bawdy escapades. Eventually relocating to Hollywood, Glyn popularized the concept of the it girl, a sobriquet for a woman with remarkable sex appeal. Renowned flapper Clara Bow was one of the first to fondly embody this moniker and openly recognized Glyn as “the original model of a new kind of sexually emancipated, professionally independent, and spiritually brave woman who inspired so many.” In this appealing follow-up to her first book, Go West, Young Women: The Rise of Early Hollywood, Hallett creates a vivacious, intellectual, and fascinating narrative, and her impressive research effectively highlights an extraordinary life that aimed to “let loose the genie of women’s sexual liberation.”

A brilliant, thought-provoking portrait of a forgotten 20th-century influencer.

Kirkus Reviews

"Highly readable and deeply researched... Writing with the right touch of occasional humor, Ms. Hallett gracefully restores Glyn’s dignity, defines her intelligence and tells the full story of her remarkable life. She makes Elinor Glyn matter."

Wall Street Journal - Jeanine Basinger

"Hallett’s sense of history makes this a biography rich in detail . . . . the “It Girl” and her creator had a profound impact on modern attitudes to love and sex — one that echoes today, long after Glyn’s name has faded, in a romance novel’s eternal promise to sweep the reader away."

Boston Globe - Joanna Scutts

"A new biography of Glyn, ‘Inventing the It Girl,’ by Hilary A. Hallett, restores her to the pantheon of history with great thoughtfulness and taste."

New York Times - Alexandra Jacobs

"Hallett’s extensive knowledge of Elinor Glyn and her milieu are apparent... Inventing the It Girl is a must-read for anyone interested in early Hollywood, as well as readers who enjoy biographies of iconic women."

News-Gazette - Nanette Donohue

"Hallett’s biography puts Glyn’s glittering influence in its historical context. It’s a thoroughly readable chronicling of a woman whose influence spanned generations."

Booklist - Susan Maguire