Elinor Glyn

Her grandfather on her mother's side, Thomas Saunders (1795–1873) was a direct descendant of the Saunders family who had possessed Pitchcott Manor in Buckinghamshire for several centuries.

The family lived in Guelph for seven years at a stone home that still stands near the University of Guelph.

Here, young Elinor was taught by her grandmother, Lucy Anne Saunders (née Willcocks), daughter of Sir Richard Willcocks, a magistrate in the early Irish police force, who helped to suppress the Emmet Rising in 1803.

Richard's brother Joseph also settled in Upper Canada, publishing one of the first opposition papers there, pursuing liberty, and dying a rebel in 1814.

The Anglo-Irish grandmother instructed young Elinor in the ways of upper-class society.

She was the younger daughter of Douglas Sutherland (1838–1865), a civil engineer of Scottish descent, and his wife Elinor Saunders (1841–1937), of an Anglo-French family that had settled in Canada.

Her father was said to be related to the Lords Duffus.

Her father died when she was two months old; her mother returned to the parental home in Guelph, in what was then Upper Canada, British North America (now Ontario) with her two daughters.

Her husband was Clayton Louis Glyn (13 July 1857 – 10 November 1915), a wealthy but spendthrift barrister and Essex landowner who was descended from Sir Richard Carr Glyn, an 18th-century Lord Mayor of London.

The couple had two daughters, Margot and Juliet, but the marriage foundered on mutual incompatibility.

Elinor Glyn ( Sutherland; 17 October 1864 – 23 September 1943) was a British novelist and scriptwriter who specialised in romantic fiction, which was considered scandalous for its time, although her works are relatively tame by modern standards.

She popularized the concept of the it-girl, and had tremendous influence on early 20th-century popular culture and, possibly, on the careers of notable Hollywood stars such as Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson and, especially, Clara Bow.

Elinor Sutherland was born on 17 October 1864 in Saint Helier, Jersey, in the Channel Islands.

Glyn's mother remarried in 1871 to David Kennedy, and the family returned to Jersey when Glyn was about eight years old.

Her subsequent education at her stepfather's house was by governesses.

Glyn's elder sister grew up to be Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon, famous as a fashion designer under the name Lucile.

Elinor married on 27 April 1892, at the age of 28.

Glyn began writing in 1900, starting with Visits of Elizabeth, serialised in The World, a book based on letters to her mother, although Lady Angela Forbes claimed, in her memoirs, that Glyn used her as the prototype of Elizabeth.

Around 1907, Glyn toured the United States, resulting in her book Elizabeth visits America (1909).

Glyn had a long affair between circa 1907 and 1916 with Lord Curzon, the former Viceroy of India.

As Glyn's husband fell into debt from around 1908, she wrote at least one novel a year to keep up her standard of living.

Her marriage was troubled, and Glyn began having affairs with various British aristocrats.

Her novel Three Weeks, about a Balkan queen who seduces a young British aristocrat, was allegedly inspired by her affair with Lord Alistair Innes Ker, brother of the Duke of Roxburghe, sixteen years her junior, which scandalized Edwardian society.

Society painter Philip de László painted her in 1912, when she was 48.

Curzon is presumed to have commissioned it and had given Glyn the sapphires she wears in the portrait.

In her novel The Man and the Moment (1914), she coined the use of the word it to mean a characteristic that "draws all others with magnetic force. With 'IT' you win all men if you are a woman–and all women if you are a man. 'IT' can be a quality of the mind as well as a physical attraction."

Her use of the word is often erroneously taken to simply be a euphemism for sexuality or sex appeal.

During World War I, Glyn became a war correspondent, working in France.

In 1915, Curzon leased Montacute House, in South Somerset, for him and Glyn, now a widow as her husband had died that autumn at the age of 58 after several years of illness.

Curzon asked Glyn to decorate Montacute House and with Glyn away from London, Curzon courted heiress Grace Duggan.

Glyn learned of Curzon and Duggan's engagement from the morning papers and burnt 500 love letters in the bedroom fireplace, never speaking to Curzon again.

Glyn pioneered risqué, and sometimes erotic, romantic fiction aimed at a female readership, a radical idea for its time.

At the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, 28 June 1919, Glyn was one of only two women present.

After the war, Glyn went to Hollywood, for the filming of her novel The Great Moment.

In 1919, she signed a contract with William Randolph Hearst's International Magazine Company to write stories and articles that included a clause for the motion picture rights.

She was brought over from England to write screenplays by the Famous Players–Lasky production company.

She wrote for Cosmopolitan and other Hearst press titles, advising women on how to keep their men and imparting health and beauty tips.

This training not only gave her an entrée into aristocratic circles on her return to Europe, it also led to her reputation as an authority on style and breeding when she worked in Hollywood in the 1920s.

Glyn was one of the most famous women screenwriters in the 1920s.

The Elinor Glyn System of Writing (1922) gives insights into writing for Hollywood studios and magazine editors of the time.