The book includes a famous scene in which the heroine rubs one out on top of a stuffed tiger.

It was about a middle-aged royal who finds herself disappointed in her husband and who takes a three-week vacation in order to tutor a younger man in the arts of love, complete with all the appropriate props, the rose petals and pearls, etc.

Now she produced Three Weeks, which became a scandalous success and sold millions of copies. She’d written novels previously, but apparently more as a hobby. She found her husband disappointing and had affaires.īy 1908 her husband was also bankrupt, and Glyn was forced to turn to her pen in order to support herself and her daughters. An aristocrat- one with money, anyway- was pretty much allowed to do anything, provided it wasn’t done in the street and frightened the horses. Her husband wasn’t exactly an aristocrat, but had access to the upper classes, who were in their Proud Tower heyday. Glyn was born in Jersey- the one in the English Channel- as a daughter of the upper middle classes, and married in 1892. I’ve been interested in Glyn for a while, as I would be in any wildly successful author who successfully re-invented the form. Who among us can’t identify strewn rose petals, piles of silk pillows, a tiger skin by the fire, and slinky lingerie as the trappings of a classic seduction scene? You’d likely recognize the image of a person in a sleek gown of silk velvet, languidly playing with a long strand of pearls around her neck (and possibly clutching a rose between her teeth), as an early icon of sexually-emancipated modern womanhood. Hallett’s Inventing the It Girl, a biography of the potboiler novelist Elinor Glyn, who is credited with inventing the form and style of the Hot Romance in the early 20th century.

His hour elinor glyn