This book reviews the cross-disciplinary debate sparked by renewed interest in Elinor Glyn’s life and legacy 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 features scholarship by Stacy Gillis, Annette Kuhn, Nickianne Moody, Caterina Riba and Carme Sanmartí, Lisa Stead, Karen Randell, and Alexis Weedonand includes, translated for the first time, the intertitles for Márton Garas, 1917 film of Three Weeks, Három hét by Orsolya Zsuppán.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Women: A Cultural Review.
An Introduction to Elinor Glyn: Her Life and Legacy
Alexis Weedon
1. Elinor Glyn, Film History and Popular Culture: An Apologia
Annette Kuln
2. Elinor Glyn's British Talkies: Voice, Nationality and the Author On-Screen
Lisa Stead
3. The Reception of Elinor Glyn's Work in Spain (1926–57)
Caterina Riba & Carme Sanmartí
4. Sin and a Tiger Skin: The Stickiness of Elinor Glyn’s Three Weeks
Stacy Gillis
5. Fashion and Fantasy: Elinor Glyn’s Contribution to Hollywood’s Debate about Marriage
Nickianne Moody
6. The Special Relationship and the Allure of Transatlantic Travel in the Work of Elinor Glyn
Karen Randell & Alexis Weedon
Appendix. Három hét (Three Weeks) translated intertitles (némafilm, Márton Garas, 1917)
Orsolya Zsuppán
Biography
Karen Randell is Professor of Film Cultures and Visiting Fellow at the University of Bedfordshire, UK. Her publications include: The War Body on Screen (2008), Re-framing 9/11: Film, Popular Culture and The War on Terror (2010), The Dark Side of Love: From Euro-Horror to American Cinema (2011) and The Cinema of Terry Gilliam: It¹s a Mad World (2013). She has collaborated with Alexis Weedon on a number of research publications.
Alexis Weedon is Professor of Publishing Studies at the University of Bedfordshire, UK. Her publications include Victorian Publishing: The Economics of Book Production for a Mass Market (2003), Elinor Glyn as Novelist, Moviemaker, Glamour Icon and Businesswoman (2014) and The Origins of Transmedia Storytelling in Early Twentieth Century Adaptation (2021). Karen Randell and Alexis Weedon co-authored, Transforming Faces for the Screen: Horror and Romance in the 1920s (2023) on Lon Chaney and Elinor Glyn.
