126. Elinor Glyn — Three Weeks with Hilary A. Hallett

KIM: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten female writers. I'm Kim Askew, here with my co-host, Amy Helmes. It feels great to be back following our month-long hiatus, and we're ready for another fantastic year.

AMY: Yes, we're invigorated and ready to go, having enjoyed the holidays, and well, now we've got another holiday approaching right? Love it, or hate it, Valentine's Day is coming up, which means we're about to be flooded with all that tried and true romantic imagery. I'm talking rose petals, red velvet, silk lingerie, strings of pearls and lovers clutched in a fierce, smoldering embrace. Now, Kim, did you ever think about who came up with all of those visuals that signify seduction?

KIM: No, and I guess it had never occurred to me that any one person was responsible for all that.

AMY: Yeah, same here. But as it turns out, we can probably give the lion's share of credit, or maybe we should say the tiger's share (more on that in a moment) to today's lost lady, Elinor Glyn. Not only did she introduce the steamy romance novel to the staid Victorian world, but as a pioneer of the Hollywood movie industry, she basically shaped how romance was and still is portrayed on the silver screen and beyond.

KIM: Additionally, she coined the term it to describe that certain intangible appeal, which makes a person irresistible. There'd be no “It” girl without Elinor Glyn.

KIM: Like the sexually liberated tiger Queen from her scandalous bestselling novel, Three Weeks, Elinor Glyn was bold, provocative, and glamorous with a magnetism that endeared her to international readers and Hollywood celebrities alike. She counted Mary Pickford, Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino, and Charlie Chaplin among her personal friends.

AMY: I had no idea how hugely famous she was in the 20th century. "Would you like to sing with Elinor Glyn?" was a catchphrase of that time period. Yet despite her lasting cultural influence, her name is largely forgotten today.

KIM: Which is why we're excited to delve into her fascinating story and her racy sex novel with the woman who literally wrote the book on Glyn.

AMY: I can't wait to introduce her. So let's rate the stacks and get started!

 [intro music plays]

KIM: Our guest today is Hilary Hallett, a professor of history and Director of American Studies at Columbia University, where she specializes in popular and mass culture in trans-Atlantic perspective, particularly theater, music, and Hollywood history. Her first book, Go West Young Women, details the pivotal role played by women in the early days of Hollywood. Her latest book is Inventing the It Girl, how Elinor Glyn Created the Modern Romance and Conquered Early Hollywood. Kirkus calls it "a brilliant thought-provoking portrait of a forgotten 20th century influencer." Hilary, welcome to the show. 

HILARY: Thank you. I'm really delighted to be here on Lost Ladies of Lit because I think Elinor Glyn definitely qualifies.

AMY: For sure.

KIM: Great. So, Elinor Glyn or Nell as she was called by the people who knew her best, hobnobbed with members of the British aristocracy. Her upper-class dignity and the air of good breeding she exuded throughout her life lent a stamp of propriety to her naughty novels. 

AMY: With striking red hair, cat-like green eyes and exquisite fashion sense, it seems like she was born to be a celebrity, but in reality her childhood was not all that glamorous. So Hilary, tell us a little bit more about Nell's youth and how it might have informed her perspective on life.

HILARY: So Nell was born in 1864. Her mother has two daughters in rapid succession, so she has an older sister who's just barely a year older than her, Lucy. And then her father dies before her first birthday, and so the mom returns to Canada where she was raised, um, to her parents' farm in Ontario, and really hands the care of her two little daughters over to her mother. And so their early years really are on this farm in rural Canada. Their grandmother is a very austere woman who had actually been born in France. And so one of both sisters' memories is getting a barrel at the end of every winter from their wealthy relations in Paris, which would just spill like the pleasures of Paris onto this farmhouse floor. And so there is this sense that they come from something finer than where they find themselves, right, but where they find themselves is a rural farm, until her mother remarries a much older Scottish bachelor. And so they go to Scotland, briefly, but then they settle in Jersey, and they live in a nice house on Jersey Island, which is really more close to France than England, right. It's in the English channel. So that's then where she lives from the age of about, 10 to 15 or 16. And what she was very lucky to have was access to her stepfather's library, and rather unfettered access to it, right? Meaning that girls, if they were chaperoned, what they were allowed to read was heavily censored. So this quality say like Virginia Woolf is another woman, you know, that had that kind of childhood, right. Access to her father's library to read whatever she wanted. That's the piece of her childhood that I actually zoned in on with the first chapter in the library because she herself identified that as being the most important thing about her childhood, next to her sister, who totally gave her her sense of style. I know we won't really get into her because there's enough with Elinor but her sister became the most notable female couturier of the period. 

KIM: Yeah. It's amazing how successful both siblings were in that family with the two sisters. So Nell had this prim and proper upbringing of a young Victorian woman. When and where did this more sensual, sexually liberated persona, that side of her, when did it start to take shape?

HILARY: Well, so I think, again, it first started to take shape in the library and in the sort of books that she chose to read. 

AMY: It's like the age old story of sneaking the naughty books, is that what you're saying? 

HILARY: Yeah, exactly. And so it starts there, but then it's also, she travels to Paris for the first time as an adolescent. And she is brought there, you know, by her mother's friend, and they don't know that she's fully fluent in French. So she's taken to see plays that girls her age would not typically get to see, starring, you know, actresses like Sarah Bernhardt, who was the most famous actress of her time. And, you know, it was quite scandalous, quite, quite scandalous, and considered not suitable. I mean, like she openly kept a string of lovers, right? Had an illegitimate son that she paraded before everybody. Slept in a coffin. I mean this like outrageous personality who was nonetheless, obviously incredibly successful and rich, um, but not considered okay for girls, and Nell sees her perform in this famous role of hers, Theodora, as a Slavic Byzantine empress, you know, a real historical figure. Um, and the love story of that play, and watching Bernhardt be that woman, really prompted her sexual awakening. And then she ends up spending several seasons when she's younger in Paris with these rich French relations that had sent that barrel to her, you know, as a child back in Canada. And they actually allow her to circulate in French society. But it's also clear that she's not really marriageable in that society because she doesn't have a dowry. She's not really an aristocrat, right. She just knows a lot of 'em.

AMY: So you mentioned this sexual awakening, but I didn't get the sense from your book that she acted on that. It seems as though she expected to settle down to a more traditional role as the wife of a country squire. She married a man named Clayton Glyn.

HILARY: That's right. She was desperate to marry by 28, which is when she married. And I think this explains some of why she did, in a weird way, remain loyal to Clayton long after… There are, I think, several reasons for that, but I think one of them was her appreciation that yes, this man who was a member of the gentry class in Essex, married her. She had no money. She had nothing but a pretty face and a witty manner. So it does give her security. It does give her access to this British aristocratic set, because this woman who's her neighbor, Daisy, the Countess of Warwick, becomes her best friend, essentially. So it gives her a lot in the beginning, but it doesn't ever give her romantic sexual satisfaction, it seems. It doesn't ever give her any emotional closeness, even. Like, they were a total misalliance. He was like a typical country squire who liked to hunt, hang out in the moors and in the woods, and that was not her idea of a good time. So after years of this miserable marriage and that most of the people in that set are not faithful to their spouses after they produce a couple children usually, which she does, she has two daughters, which is a disappointment of course, because they're girls. But nonetheless, it's clear there aren't gonna be any more children. She writes actually, that she felt like it was an embarrassment to her husband that she continued to remain faithful. 

KIM: Yeah. What's wrong with her? Yeah.

HILARY: Right? But she starts to write as her escape. And it really becomes an antidote to what we would easily today just call depression and anxiety, caused by this very, very unhappy marriage. 

KIM: All right, so then along comes Three Weeks, which was published in 1907, and, yeah, that basically took the world by storm. I guess that's even an understatement. So Hilary, let's talk about the response this novel received, because it seems like there was all this pearl-clutching in polite society, but basically everyone and their sister was sneaking a peek in this book, right?

HILARY: Right. Right. And their brothers too!

KIM: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

HILARY: She got a lot of letters from servicemen during World War I, you know, telling them how much they loved that book. Yeah, I mean the critical response to it though? Excoriating. So in Britain where they specialize in the kind of art of sniffing, you know, disapproval, it was met with just like, you know, "She doesn't have enough talent to pull this off and, you know, blah, blah, blah." But what they also called it, they branded it, um, a "sex novel," which was this new term at the time. Books that weren't pornography, but they focused on the so-called "woman question" as Freud put it, right? Like, what is up with the modern woman? Why is she so unhappy? And these books specifically took up the place of sexuality in the modern woman's problems and challenges. And they were considered, in Britain especially, but also in America where the book was hated as well by the critics, to show the influence of France. Because French literature had very different obscenity standards than English literature, right? France allowed for a lot more frank talk about sex, unsurprisingly. And so it had really become the lingua franca of realistic fiction, right? Fiction that wanted to deal with the force of sexual desire and morality and problems in a more open and honest way. And her book, to be fair, the critics did have a point. Three Weeks is one long, mostly fervid seduction scene. You know, there was a reason that it was considered obscene in Boston by people like Anthony Comstock and banned in Canada, and, you know, they didn't allow it to be sold at the largest British bookstore chains. It was, it was scandalous.

AMY: Mm-hmm. Yeah, she does, she goes from one sex scene to the next. They're just strung together. And we'll talk about that in a minute, but I love how Nell, all right, she's getting all this flack, but she is completely unapologetic about it. So when she goes to America for, I guess a, a book tour, she gets called out by the society ladies in New York City. And then that caused a big brouhaha in the press. Can you retell that anecdote for our listeners?

HILARY: Yeah, yeah, sure. The Pilgrim Mothers. They were actually a New England society. They were there for this luncheon. They had invited her to talk about this book, and it became clear when she arrived that they had not read the book when they invited her. And partially because the press and the critics, as I said, are making it clear what a bad French naughty book this is, one would think they should have just canceled the lunch, right? But instead they go through the lunch, but they tell her she can't speak and they sit her in a little corner off to the side where the people at her table basically interrogate her about why she wrote this bad book. And so, right, they did treat her pretty badly . Even though the critics hate her, the press love her, particularly in America, and on this first book tour where she really displays and develops the sort of art of managing the press, which is one of her many talents. Um, and so she tells the press how badly she's been treated and they quote, you know, the quote that I know that you love is, "Never in all my young life have I've seen such aggregation of dowds, frumps and tabby cats, women who are breastless, slab-hipped, and pancake-footed frights.”

KIM: I love it. She basically was like, she didn't care and she couldn't have done a better thing to stand up for herself and kind of keep press on her side probably. I mean, they probably ate that up.

HILARY: Exactly. Well, you know what she actually did though, was that when she left, she corrected that quote and she said, "They caught my spirit, but not my words. I would never have compared them to cats."

KIM: It's like cats are too good for them.

HILARY: Exactly. They were "sparrows." That's what she said. They were sparrows. Right. But yes, she couldn't be shamed down.

KIM: Good for her. 

HILARY: That was the what the whole trip demonstrated, was that rather and be sort of slut-shamed as we would say today, she sort of invents this literary persona which kind of harnesses a lot of the appeal of that heroine from this novel, but adds her own sort of British lady spin to it. And you know, she just rides out the scandal and she's like, "You know what? I know I'm being criticized a lot, but I sold 50,000 books last week so I think I can handle a little criticism."

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. And because she's so glamorous, she just comes across like a lady and so it seems appropriate. Yeah.

HILARY: Exactly, exactly. Everywhere she goes, the press reports on her outfits.

KIM: She's so cool.

HILARY: You know, she's like, by that point, she's what, 43 or four or something? And you would think she was like a supermodel…

KIM: Yeah.

HILARY: …the way that, you know, the attention paid to like every garment.

KIM: She's fascinating. So as you point out in your book, I thought this was great, for many years if you wanted to show that a character was loose or morally corrupt, all you had to do was depict them reading a copy of Three Weeks. So everyone knew exactly what it signified. So let's dive in a little more into why this book was so titillating. We've hinted a bit at it, but can you give us a brief rundown of the plot, Hilary?

HILARY: Sure. Yeah. It is essentially the story of the education, sensual, but moral and aesthetic as well, of a young British man. He is in his early twenties, you know, typical British aristocrat, has been sent away by his family because he's developed this unsuitable attachment back home. And so the novel opens, he's in Switzerland, his first stop, and he spies this lady, and that is what she's called for most of the book, just “the lady.” She's this mysterious older woman that he spies in the dining room. And she's not beautiful, he's quick to say, but she has this magnetism, and he cannot take his eyes away. She spies him as well, and decides that he's a handsome young thing and that she wants to seduce him, you know. And it starts off as she says, you know, very clearly, “I've just picked you for my pleasure and for our pleasure.” Three weeks is the amount of time they have together. As it goes on, it's clear then that part of why she's having the affair. She wants to have a love child with him. She really controls the entire thing. And then he wakes up one morning and she's gone and he is destroyed and distraught, and falls into a brain fever, as of course one did back in 1907. And basically like when he awakens, you know, he learns her true identity. 

 AMY: Yeah, the reader knows kind of her story, and so there's this ticking clock of something's gonna happen. This can't end well. 

HILARY: You're absolutely right. And that does add, you know, a kind of urgency to it all and contributes to its sort of heightened everything about the book is so fervid and heightened Yeah. And intense. Yeah. Yeah. 

AMY: And to give our listeners, um, an idea of that, I think the best thing we could do is just read the infamous scene on the tiger skin rug. It's pretty early on in the book, so it's not gonna be a spoiler or anything like that. It speaks for itself, and I should probably preface it with some “Bowm-chicka-bow-wow” sound effects. 

KIM: Get ready, listeners!

AMY: Okay, so just to set this up, um, Paul, our young man, has sent the lady the gift of a tiger skin rug and has had it delivered to her room. She responds with a note that summons him to see her later that evening.

So this is what Paul finds when he arrives at her room: 

A bright fire burned in the grate, and some palest orchid-mauve silk curtains were drawn in the lady's room when Paul entered from the terrace. And loveliest sight of all, in front of the fire, stretched at full length, was his tiger — and on him — also at full length — reclined the lady, garbed in some strange clinging garment of heavy purple crepe, it's hem embroidered with gold, one white arm resting on the beast's head, her back supported by a pile of the velvet cushions, and a heap of rarely bound books at her side, while between her red lips was a rose not redder than they — an almost scarlet rose. Paul had never seen one as red before. 

So she welcomes Paul into the room. She tells him to have a seat she then proceeds to thank him for this rug. 

   “You bought me the tiger, Paul. Ah! that was good. My beautiful tiger!” And she gave a movement like a snake, of joy to feel its fur under her, while she stretched out her hands and caressed the creature where the hair turned white and black at the side, and was deep and soft.

   “Beautiful one, beautiful one,” she purred. “And I know all of your feelings and your passions, and now I have got your skin — for the joy of my skin!” And she quivered again with the movements of a snake. It is not difficult to imagine that Paul felt far from calm during this scene —

[everyone laughing]

HILARY: British understatement.

KIM: Yes. 

AMY: — indeed, he was obliged to hold onto his great chair to prevent himself from seizing her in his arms. 

   “I'm — I'm so glad you like him,” he said in a choked voice. “I thought probably you would. And your own was not worthy of you. I found this by chance. And oh! good God! If you knew how you are making me feel — lying there, wasting your caresses upon it!”

 She tossed the scarlet rose over to him. It hit his mouth. 

[everyone laughing]

AMY: A lot of the book is like this. That's why it's so entertaining to read. 

“I am not wasting them,” she said, the innocence of a kitten in her strange eyes — their color impossible to define today. “Indeed not, Paul! He was my lover in another life — perhaps —who knows?”

“But I,” said Paul, who was now quite mad, “want to be your lover in this!”

Then he gasped at his own boldness. With a lightning movement, she lay on her face, raised her elbows on the tiger's head, and supported her chin in her hands. Perfectly straight out her body was, the twisted purple drapery outlining her perfect shape and flowing in graceful lines beyond — like a serpent's tale.The velvet pillows fell scattered at one side. 

“Paul, what do you know of lovers or love?” she said. “My baby, Paul!”

“I know enough to know I know nothing yet which is worth knowing,” he said confusedly. “But — but — don't you understand, I want you to teach me —”

“You are so sweet, Paul. When you plead like that, I am taking in every bit of you. In your way as perfect as this tiger. But we must talk— oh! — such a great, great deal — first.”

A rage of passion was racing through Paul. His incoherent thoughts were that he did not want to talk — only to kiss her— to devour her — to strangle her with love if necessary. 

He bit the rose. 

[Everyone laughing.]

“You see, Paul, love is a purely physical emotion,” she continued. “We could speak an immense amount about souls and sympathy and understanding and devotion. All beautiful things in their way, and possible to be enjoyed at a distance from one another. All the things which make passion noble — but without love — which is passion — these things dwindle and become duties presently, when the hysterical exaltation cools. Love is tangible. It means to be close — close — to be clasped — to be touching — to be one.” And I'll just stop there. And that's just the, one of the first scenes, and it just gets more racy from there.

HILARY: You read that really well. 

KIM: Yeah, you did. 

AMY:I know.I felt like I had that inner spirit in me, to give that. 

HILARY: You definitely did. Yeah.

AMY: Um, so yeah, let's just talk about our thoughts. I'll say first off, I love the pacing of it. She gets into the sex scenes right away. She's not stringing you along. Uh, Hilary, I think you write, "With a speed of a set of skillful fingers un-fastening a row of tiny buttons along the spine of a woman's evening gown." That's how she lays it out for you. But at the same time, there's so much suspense, uh, you know, as getting to it. Um, and she, at the very beginning, I think, of the American version, she writes a little introduction where she calls it a bad book. And she cautions readers “don't skip ahead to the naughty bits.” Which, I love that she knows that that's gonna be the temptation.

KIM: They're probably still gonna do it even more.

HILARY: Exactly. Exactly. I mean, you don't know whether that's a real admonishment or it's like, "Yeah, there's lots of naughty bits here in my BAD BOOK." 

KIM: It's burlesque writing. Um, I just like the fact that she makes the woman the seducer, and this innocent young boy who is… or not boy, but very young guy, um, and he ends up the one with brain fever and everything. Like, she really turns the typical story when you're reading about seduction to make the woman the seducer like this. I mean, it's kind of amazing.

AMY: That scene where she insists that she pay for the meal very early on, and he gets angry at her and she's like, “no, this is non-negotiable. I'm paying for it.” The role reversal of masculine and feminine. You could see how this is a template for the romance novel genre. Just the literary techniques that she uses. So I noticed that she would often have Paul stop himself from completing a thought, which was very erotic in a weird way, You know mean? Like that building up of tension and in the way he spoke and then like, kind of would stop himself. Then also the words. I should have done like a highlight, you know, word count for quivering, throbbing... 

KIM: yes. Undulating. She undulates all the time. 

HILARY: yeah,yeah.

KIM: The whole thing where she's like a snake. It's like you're trying to picture how she's undulating so much.

HILARY: Right. 

KIM: She's driving him crazy. 

AMY: She's, I mean, She's basically masturbating. 

KIM: Exactly. On the tiger skin rug. Yeah, for sure.

HILARY: That's totally how I read it. And so she was exposed to erotica, pornography. There were a lot of decadent writers at the turn of the last century that she read, including a famous one about a famous dominatrix. So I do think there are little bits of that in here too, right? I mean, I think the major inspiration is both her own sexual frustration, she writes about the tiger skin . And, you know, her husband had refused to get it for her. She had bought it for herself with her first royalty check. So to have this reverse fantasy where the young man, she doesn't even have to ask. He just delivers, it is a total role reversal, although there were decadent writers in that period that were writing those kinds of heroines. An actress like Sarah Bernhardt in France was able to play some of them, right? In many ways, “Theodora,” that play that I was telling you about, features that kind of heroine. 

KIM: Okay. 

HILARY: it's really interesting, though, for me to hear you all, you know, just to hear your reactions because I came to this already knowing somewhat about the period, and I knew why it was a shocking book, but when I read it, I was still incredibly surprised at how much of it focused on the seduction. That was not typical of time.

KIM: Mm-hmm.

HILARY: At all.

AMY: I thought it would be much more veiled or you know, we'd see it, but it would be the Victorian version of that. No, it pretty much goes there. 

HILARY: Everything's about their sexcapades. Even like, and if you know the titles of the book, she's reading him, those are erotic texts from the ancient world where they were much more explicit about sex. So it was, um, I was just like, wow, lady, you were ahead of your time. 

AMY: Right. And I liked it! I know we were snorting through my reading rendition, and there are a lot of moments where you're gonna laugh out loud, listeners, at this book, but I didn't expect to actually enjoy it as much as I did. same. I read it basically in one sitting, and I thought I really liked the story. It kind of reminded me listeners will know this… of Kim and I, we love the movie Somewhere in Time. 

HILARY: Uh-huh.

AMY: And it has a lot of the same elements of like a travel situation where they're at a hotel. A mysterious woman. The fever dream, the, the time is running out.

KIM: It can't last. 

AMY: It's like Somewhere in Time meets Nine and a Half Weeks.

KIM: Yeah, 

HILARY: Yeah, there you go. 

KIM: I like that. Yeah. Yeah. 

HILARY: I do like that. But yet set in the Edwardian period.

KIM: And she doesn't drag it out, that's for sure. It's short and sweet. 

AMY: Yeah. Um, and I also think we have to read Mark Twain's reaction. 

HILARY: Oh yeah. It's so great, isn't it? 

AMY: Yeah. Oh my God. 

HILARY: I love that quote.

AMY: So he clearly had read it. He kind of was reluctant to endorse it because he has his own brand and his own readers that he has to be careful, but he kind of had a comic reaction to it. He wrote, "The lovers recognize that their passion is a sacred thing and that its commands must be obeyed. They get to obeying them at once, and they keep on obeying them and obeying them to the reader's intense delight and disapproval, and the process of obeying them is described several times, almost exhaustively, but not quite."

HILARY: It’s so great. But I was disappointed in him because he, in private, told her that he loved the book and thought it was amazing and thought it was so important, and did think that like Anglo-American obscenity standards about sex were ridiculous. But as you say, he has this image as this homespun, plain-spoken, middle-American guy. And, he was also a very smart author, you know, who, who himself had developed this persona his audience loved, and so he wouldn't endorse her in public, even though he told her how much he liked it in private. I just thought he was braver than that, you know, I thought he was a little braver. I mean like he would speak out against wars that America was involved in!

AMY: It was a cute… I thought what he wrote was pretty cute, though,

HILARY: It was cute. It was cute. But that was in his journal.

AMY: Oh! I thought he publicly said that. 

HILARY: No, no, 

KIM: Oh.

HILARY: no, no, no, no, no,

AMY: If he had come out and said that, I think it would have been a tacit endorsement.

KIM: A wink, wink kind of thing. Yeah. 

HILARY: No. That was his private writing.

KIM: Oh. 

HILARY: Yeah. 

KIM: Shame on you, Mark Twain. All right, So we know that Nell's husband was not providing her with this level of romantic passion we're seeing in Three Weeks. They did have two daughters together, as you said, but I think it's safe to say the embers of desire were pretty non-existent there. Was Three Weeks an exercise in wish-fulfillment for a sexually-frustrated Nell or was it inspired by any secret passion in her life?

HILARY: Well, there was one young admirer that, um, right before she composed this book, Clayton, unusually, uncharacteristically, um, you know, after this man had been traveling with them for months, uh, ordered her to send away. And so I do think that in his particularities, Paul is modeled on this Alistair person. Um, but he was younger and as you can see in the book, Nell appreciated handsome young men. But on the other hand, she did retain a more sort of middle-class Victorian core in many ways, despite her, you know, protestations, that I think really was instilled in her, of course, by her mother, so I think it's a little bit of both. I think there's a little bit of the model in there, but it was also definitely an indirect way to retaliate against Clayton. He had not bought her a tiger skin rug that she had seen and admired in a window when they were shopping in the Alps. And she luckily got a royalty check not long afterwards and went back and bought it herself, right? And that kind of says it all.

KIM: Yeah. And then she makes it the setup for the notorious scene that the whole world is reading basically. 

HILARY: Right. "Would you like to sin on a tiger skin with Elinor Glyn or would you prefer to err with her on some other fur?" That's supposed to be George Bernard Shaw.

KIM: Oh yeah. That, that actually makes sense.

HILARY: Yeah.

KIM: Okay, so it seems like it was pretty risky, socially, for her to have written this book and attached her real name to it. Why do you think she was willing to just go for it? And do you think she was purposefully trying to lob a metaphorical hand grenade at society? What was her aim with this?

HILARY: I mean, she was an outsider to the society. However much they had sort of taken her in, she wasn't born and bred in aristocratic society. I do think the level of outrage even though her friend Daisy tried to tell her, that did surprise her. I mean, the way that she writes about that till she dies, basically still, you can tell she's a little bitter over it, right? The hypocrisy of it. I think she was proud of that book. She wrote it in what she described as kind of a white hot fever. She did, right before she decided to publish it, find out the full extent of her family's money woes, and even though she had been basically supporting them by that point for several years, there was a mercenary element to it too. There was a like, "Wow, I'm kind of proud of this. And it is sort of sensational. And this really could be popular," right? Because as she was writing more explicit romantic fiction, audiences were liking it. It was a bit like throwing a hand grenade. I think you're right. I think she could pretend a little bit like it wasn't, but it was, and Daisy, her friend, told her that. She told her that she would get kicked out of society if she published it, so I think that she was kind of at a point where she was just willing to risk it, and I do think it went worse than she expected on the society front. 

AMY: I think it's funny that famed anarchist Emma Goldman loved it. 

HILARY: Totally. Yeah. It's not surprising though if famed anarchist Emma Goldman calls it a “declaration of independence” and a “masterpiece” that society people can't mostly admit to that in public because you know, it would tacitly at least admit that so many peers' parentage was uncertain. 

KIM: Yes. 

HILARY: Right? 

KIM: The elephant in the room there. 

HILARY: Yeah. She wasn't a revolutionary by heart though. She did really love these more conservative-minded aristocratic circles.

KIM: That's what amazes me about her just standing up for it anyway. Like, there's a strength of character there that's admirable.

HILARY: I agree. 

KIM: So although she went on to write many other successful books following Three Weeks, let's pivot now to her impressive career in the motion picture industry, which is fascinating. So Hilary, how did she end up in Hollywood in 1920?

HILARY: So she ends up there. She's become, just briefly, I'll say, even more famous during World War I for all of this press reporting that she's doing. She specifically is sort of enlisted by the French government because she is so popular in the United States, and of course France and Britain are desperate for the United States to join this fight. And so, in her depression after her husband has died and her lover has dumped her, she goes back to France and she spends the next two years there almost, writing for William Randolph Hearst's chain of newspapers, writing all these articles, continuing to publish books. So she's really at the height of her sort of brand name recognition when World War I ends. And at that moment in the States, this new business called Hollywood that seems to have literally taken the world by storm is everywhere. And it is like, people are almost shocked that it's succeeded and, and taken off so quickly, right? And so, Jesse Lasky and Samuel Goldwin, um, Jesse Lasky is the vice president of charge of production of what will become Paramount Studios and Samuel Goldwin in his brother-in-law, have this contest that they call a Game of Authors, and they're competing to see who can bag the biggest literary name and get them to come to Los Angeles and write for the screen. And so that's the exact impetus, right? Paramount, of course, is gonna be known as the first real glamor studio. And so they are even more interested in sort of this high class glamorous allure. And in any case, they bring her, they bring Somerset Maugham, they bring Gilbert Parker, they bring a bunch of mostly British writers to Los Angeles as so-called eminent authors. And she's the only one that stays. She's the only one that flourishes. She just kind of never looks back and she's, you know, at this point, 54 years old. 

KIM: So can you talk about the influence that she had on the film industry and maybe some of her strengths or biggest contributions to it?

HILARY: Yeah. Yeah. Um, so it sounds really kind of almost too much, but you know, she really did bring knowledge about glamor to the industry. And I think that I was slow to fully accept that until Cecil Beaton said it . And when Cecil Beaton said it, I was like, Okay. I mean, if Cecil Beaton said it, 

KIM: Yeah.

HILARY: You know, he was just this huge admirer of hers from childhood when he read Three Weeks, you know, at some British boarding school. But, you imagine how young and mostly uneducated and from very modest backgrounds these Hollywood folks were, and they're trying to depict all these kinds of settings and act like these much more sophisticated, glamorous, worldly people. Part of what she did was she mentored this first generation of Hollywood stars and helped people like Gloria Swanson learn how to actually dress like someone who was glamorous. Not like a chorus girl, as she put it. And that's what she thought. Everybody just looked common. That was her word.

KIM: Cue the makeover scene.

HILARY: Yeah, exactly. And so she brought style, she brought elegance, she brought a staging to, you know, how to literally like perform heterosexual passion. Um, some of the elements of which, you know, we've already discussed in Three Weeks that became iconic for symbolizing sexual passion mm-hmm. , um, you know, she brought a kind of savvy over PR management that Hollywood didn't yet understand and desperately needed to learn, you know, as scandals continually started to erupt, right? And the Bohemian young party-going crowd, which included a lot of people, you know, um, you needed to learn some restraint in staging your publicity in ways that didn't let everything all hang out or you were gonna be in trouble a lot with censorship reformers and moral reformer types. So that's what she gave them too, 

AMY: She was like the grownup in the room.

HILARY: She was the grown-up! She was literally 20 years older than almost anyone else she worked with. So she was almost a full generation older than them, sometimes even more, right? She's there from 56 to 66. Gloria Swanson is like 21 when she meets her. She said she was old enough to be my grandmother. 

AMY: But that probably kept her young, the fact that she was able to make this transition and had she stayed in England, it would've been a different ballgame for her.

HILARY: A hundred percent. 

KIM: Right. 

HILARY: Yeah. I mean, that was essential, I think. Yeah.

KIM: Can you talk about the term "It" and Clara Bow being what we think of as the original "It" girl, but it actually originated with Elinor.

HILARY: That's right. So she had been talking about "it" literally since she came to, you know, work in Hollywood in 1920, and she described it then, as this kind of personal magnetism that attracts both sex. She likened it, of course, in her longer definition to the magnetism that cats have. You know, you have to be unbiddable, confident and unselfconscious. It wasn't exactly the same thing as sex appeal, but that was definitely what it allowed people to talk about. So it became a very handy way for people to talk about sex in an era, again, we have to remember where you couldn't do that still directly. And so she's talking about "It" and she writes a story called It, but it's not the story that you see in the movie that stars Clara Bow. But she's made this concept famous, and then it's actually a producer at Paramount that works with Bow that comes to her and says, "Listen, I've read all about you talking about "It," what do you think about us promoting Clara Bow as the "It" girl? And she's like, "Let me meet her." And I don't know if either of you've ever seen Clara Bow act, but she has "It," trust me. You know, she is that magnetic person that you just can't take your eyes off. And so Glyn saw that, like everyone did, immediately, um, and so, Clara talks about how important it was that Elinor Glyn promoted her this way because of course they do all this publicity together. And that it gave her confidence having someone like Glyn pick Bow to be her first "It" girl. You know, this gave her that thing she needed to become a superstar and really the first sex symbol of the twenties as a woman. But she didn't want Glyn to change her, like Swanson did, or Valentino did, or all these other actors that she had worked with before her. I think that that was interesting that by that point, I think the culture was starting to move on and the kind of settings and characters that she knew best, you know, we're, we're heading into the Depression now, right? These really kind of hard-boiled characters. It's not gonna be, you know, that that world is just gonna be a sort of interesting element, but it's not gonna have the same sort of purchase and, you know, interest that it did before.

AMY: And speaking of her kind of decline in Hollywood, as she got older it seems like her family, her two daughters and their husbands back in England, kind of tried to take the reins from her in terms of her business dealings. And it was infuriating to read about that in your book because she was still 100% with it. She knew what she wanted and like they were, they were somehow trying to better deal her, you know. I think they were trying to act in her best interest, but do you think their interference contributed to her reputation dwindling a bit?

HILARY: Yeah, I mean, I think for sure is the short answer. I mean, when Irving Thalberg offered to be a 50-50 producer with her and absorb all the financial risks and costs, he was not quite yet “Irving Thalberg of the Academy Award for best producer,” but it was quite clear that he was going to be. So that's like as once in a lifetime opportunity as you can get. And she had signed the paperwork, she was excited. This was what she'd been looking for. And you know, it was very painful actually, that part of the writing and the research, and I did worry a little bit about what her family would think reading it. I mean, they treated her almost like a slightly daffy, slightly addled old lady who didn't know what she was talking about, when in fact they had NO idea, I mean, especially her son-in-law, you know, he starts filing lawsuits and threatening lawsuits and, you know, just creating all this drama around, you know, a business that he literally knows nothing about, 

AMY: Right. So all the Hollywood types are like, "It's not worth it." 

HILARY: It's not worth it. I think it was the combination, she's getting older, which she undeniably was. It was amazing that she was as successful as she was still in her sixties. And she's too much trouble to work with. And I think it also, it made her mistrust the producers in a way that she really had it before because she was close to her family, and their opinion did matter to her even though she knew that they were wrong in a lot of particulars. I do think that their suspicions of the producers affected her.

AMY: So okay, listeners, there's so much from Elinor Glyn's story that we haven't even had time to dive into. There's so much more than what you've just heard. She was one of only two women in the Hall of Mirrors, for example, to witness the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. And there's also the story of her sister, Lucy Duff Gordon, who was a tremendously successful fashion designer and who famously, and controversially, survived the sinking of the Titanic. Like how much more can you put into this family's incredible life? So really what you need to do is you need to go get Hilary's biography to get the full picture, all the stories. Hilary, you had so much amazing material to work with, I can imagine it was almost hard to edit down what you were gonna include.

HILARY: It definitely was. It could have been a lot longer. I mean, it already is a little longer than I wanted it to be, but, you know, I didn't wanna write like a door stopper, biography. That was not what I was going for.

AMY: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. But I do love that you took the time in the biography to put it all in the context of the time period in both British society and the Hollywood enclave at the time. So in that way it really feels like more than just a biography of one woman's life. It's kind of like a snapshot of the entire era, which I enjoyed.

HILARY: Thank you. That was the idea. I wanted it to definitely be like life and times.

KIM: Thank you again for joining us today to share your knowledge. This has been fantastic. .

HILARY: Thank you. I really enjoyed this, ladies. I admire you for this podcast. I think it's amazing. So I'm really thrilled that you invited me to be on it. Um, and I'm glad that you liked Elinor, and I hope some of your readers do too.

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. You guys all need to run out right now and get your copy of Hilary's Inventing the It Girl. And while you're at it, pick up one of those naughty copies of Three Weeks. I promise you it does not disappoint even if you are only in it for the laughs.

 KIM: And while you're at it, you can share the link for this episode with anyone you know who enjoys old books and Hollywood history. Those referrals and shout outs really mean a lot to us, and they help new listeners find us.

AMY: Our theme song was written and recorded by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. “Lost Ladies of Lit” is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.