Word: elinore
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...generation ago, Elinor Glyn was a name that caused many a ruction between the world and his wife. To the world, Author Glyn was hot stuff; to his wife, she was a Creature who wrote Vile Books. The post-War world can hardly remember what all the shouting was about, can just barely recollect that Elinor Glyn once wrote a notorious bestseller, Three Weeks, was credited with inventing "It," an outmoded synonym for the equally outmoded expression "sex appeal.'' Last week Elinor Glyn refreshed the U. S.'s memory about who and what she was. Her autobiography...
Being a Lady, Elinor Glyn has not told everything. Locked away in her diaries, the "unvarnished truth" is still imprisoned. But in Romantic Adventure she has let out some, after giving it a ladylike shellacking. Born on the Island of Jersey of Scotch-Canadian parents, Elinor Glyn (nee Sutherland) spent her early childhood in Canada in an atmosphere of "aristocratic exclusiveness" which she admits was "already nearly a century out of date" but which stood her in good stead in her lifelong pursuit of Romance. Elinor's older sister (afterwards Lady Duff-Gordon) was considered the beauty...
...refuge from reality she took to books. Her heterodox hair and her heterogeneous reading made her "a rather embittered little philosopher" at 16. But Romance soon reared its tousled head again, in the person of an Eton boy on vacation, with whom Elinor ate candy and discussed the classics. On a visit to Paris, a little later, she was beset by a passionate Frenchman, who took her to the zoo, thrilled her to the marrow by whispering "Belle Tigresse!" (beautiful tigress) in her ear. From that adventure Elinor dates her hunger for tiger skins, of which she afterwards had seven...
...Elinor was pleased to discover that there was something about her that men liked. It might have been her figure, with its 18-in. waist. "Whatever it was," says she, "I became a sort of storm centre wherever I went." After one countryhouse ball, four of her suitors after quarreling over her jumped in the lake in full evening dress, then returned to the house and took baths in their host's best champagne. When news of this episode reached one Clayton Glyn, an eligible socialite old bachelor, he made up his mind that Elinor was the girl...
...rented the public swimming baths for two days for their private use, so that he and his bride might swim there naked. The honeymoon over, they settled down to the life of travel, houseparties, "seasons" in London, the routine existence of their English set. After two years of marriage, Elinor found that Romance had flown. When she indignantly reported to Clayton that one of his friends had kissed her, he simply smiled. Elinor says she had plenty of opportunity to make him laugh on the wrong side of his face. Divorce in those days was social suicide, but discreet affairs...