Inventing the It Girl: How Elinor Glyn Created Modern Romance and Conquered Early Hollywood

“ is exquisitely researched and truly addictive—a must-read for anyone beguiled by early Hollywood.”—Anne Helen Petersen “[Elinor Glyn] brought style and sophistication to a still-parochial Hollywood. . . . How this powerhouse creature could have gone so long without due recognition is a mystery, but Hilary A. Hallett has more than corrected the oversight in this rich and riveting biography.”—Molly Haskell, author of “In , the ‘Tiger Queen’ of romance fiction finally gets the serious treatment she deserves.”—Heather Clark, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist “As the rhyme goes, I would ‘like to sin with Elinor Glyn’, failing that, reading Hilary Hallett’s joyous biography is the next best thing. Clever, irreverent, entrepreneurial, and way ahead of her time, Elinor Glyn gave women permission to explore their desires. restores the original Queen of Romance to her rightful place in history.”—Amanda Foreman, author of “Glamorous, sexy, enticing, brilliant, stylish, sophisticated: One quickly runs out of adjectives to describe both Elinor Glyn and the book Hilary Hallett has written about her… Glyn is blessed by having Hallett as her biographer. Her meticulous research, graceful prose, and historical insights grab and hold the reader’s interest from first page to last.”—David Nasaw, author of “With , Hilary A. Hallett reintroduces us to Madame Elinor Glyn, author, scenarist, and social agitator, who in the early years of the twentieth century taught a generation of women how to claim agency over their lives and desires. As Hollywood’s arbiter of both good taste and sex appeal, Glyn turned Victorian moralism into sexual liberation, and the world was never the same again.”—William J. Mann, author of