Elinor Glyn and her legacy

Abstract

This introduction to British Elinor Glyn's life and legacy reviews the cross-disciplinary debate sparked by renewed interest in Glyn by film scholars and literary and feminist historians, and offers a range of views of Glyn's cultural and historical significance and areas for future research. Elinor Glyn was a celebrity figure in the 1920s. In the magazines she gave tips on beauty and romance, on keeping your man, and on the contentious issue of divorce. Her racy stories were turned into films – most famously, Three Weeks (1924) and It (1927). Decades on the ‘It Girl’ remains in common currency, defining the sexy, sassy and alluring young woman. She was beloved by readers of romance, and her films were distributed widely in Europe and the Americas. They were viewed by the judiciary as scandalous, but by others—Hollywood and the Spanish Catholic Church—as acceptably conservative. Glyn has become a peripheral figure in histories of this period, marginalized in accounts of the youth-centred ‘flapper era’. This book reviews the cross-disciplinary debate sparked by renewed interest in Glyn by film scholars and literary and feminist historians, and offers a range of views of Glyn's cultural and historical significance and areas for future research. It features scholarship by Stacy Gillis Annette Kuhn, Nickianne Moody, Caterina Riba and Carme Sanmartí, Lisa Stead, Karen Randell, and Alexis Weedon and includes translated for the first time the intertitles for Márton Garas, 1917 film of Three Weeks, Három hét by Orsolya Zsuppán.