As is often the case, the victor writes the history, and in the evolution of how power and prestige got distributed in the American film industry white men obviously won out.īut the reality of Hollywood’s founding, as much recent work has shown, was far more complicated given that it was the least sex-segregated of America’s major industries when Elinor Glyn arrived in Los Angeles in 1920. DeMille, and Mack Sennett, or the business smarts of the mostly immigrant Jewish men who built the Hollywood studio system. This story focuses either on the creative genius of directors D.W. Nowhere has this notion about the assumed maleness of the movers and shakers who created our cultural past been more pervasive-or wrong-than in what has been called the basic story about the founding of Hollywood. Perhaps there is a vague awareness that women readers-long the primary consumers of fiction-and writers like Jane Austen were central from the start to the fortunes of the novel in Anglo-America (arguably its first mass culture).

Most believe that the stories and images that took flight in the imaginations of so many people more than a century ago were man-made. When she died peacefully in London, Glyn’s obituaries called her “the founder of the modern sex novel” and “originator of the popular term ‘It.’” They also recalled that the redheaded writer with cat-green eyes who had “shocked the world of our grandmothers” had “led a life as glamorous as anything in her novels,” earning the friendship and respect of the most powerful and creative personalities in Britain, France, and America, through war and peace, over the half century between 18.Įlinor Glyn’s life and legacy gives the lie to some of the most enduring assumptions regarding the dynamics involved in the ascent of mass culture.

My new book is an unconventional biography about an unconventional British woman, the late Victorian romance writer and celebrity author Elinor Glyn (1864–1943) who midwifed much of the sexual ethos of Anglo-American popular culture.

It by elinor glyn