Reconfiguring Elinor Glyn: Ageing Female Experience and the Origins of the ‘It Girl’

Abstract

Elinor Glyn (1864–1943) was a feted English author and celebrity figure of the 1920s who — while in her 50s and 60s — was constantly in the Hollywood press. She wrote articles for Cosmopolitan magazine on how to attract and keep men and ‘racy’ stories about love and romance, many of which were turned into films — most famously Three Weeks (Crosland, 1924)1 and It (Badger, 1927). Decades on, the idea of the ‘It Girl’ continues to be pertinent in the postfeminist discourses of the twenty-first century and has been applied by the world’s glamour press to up-and-coming young actresses and models from Marilyn Monroe and Edie Sedgwick to Alexa Chung and Kate Upton. However, many other contemporary stars, including both older women and men, such as Helen Mirren, Judi Dench, Diane Keaton, Meryl Streep, George Clooney and Matthew McConaughey, have also been credited with having ‘It’ on screen and off. This evokes Glyn’s original definition of ‘It’ where the sexual attraction and charisma was not linked to gender nor age, but to a person’s manner and sense of allure. Her formulation of the term was developed at the beginning of the century and became central to popular culture of the 1920s. Yet despite being a hugely influential and instrumental figure in her day, until very recently Glyn has been a peripheral figure in histories of this period, an older woman marginalised in accounts of the youth-centred ‘flapper era’.