Inventing the It Girl
How Elinor Glyn Created the Modern Romance and Conquered Early Hollywood
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Narrated by:
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Pamela Almand
About this listen
The modern romance novel is elevated to a subject of serious study in this addictive biography of pioneering celebrity author Elinor Glyn.
Unlike typical romances, which end with wedding bells, Elinor Glyn’s story really began after her marriage up the social ladder and into the English gentry class in 1892. Born in the Channel Islands, Elinor Sutherland, like most Victorian women, aspired only to a good match. But when her husband, Clayton Glyn, gambled their fortune away, she turned to her pen and boldly challenged the era’s sexually straightjacketed literary code with her notorious succes de scandale, Three Weeks. An intensely erotic tale about an unhappily married woman’s sexual education of her young lover, the novel got Glyn banished from high society but went on to sell millions, revealing a deep yearning for a fuller account of sexual passion than permitted by the British aristocracy or the Anglo-American literary establishment.
In elegant prose, Hilary A. Hallett traces Glyn’s meteoric rise from a depressed society darling to a world-renowned celebrity author who consorted with world leaders from St. Petersburg to Cairo to New York. After reporting from the trenches during World War I, the author was lured by American movie producers from Paris to Los Angeles for her remarkable third act. Weaving together years of deep archival research, Hallett movingly conveys how Glyn, more than any other individual during the Roaring Twenties, crafted early Hollywood’s glamorous romantic aesthetic. She taught the screen’s greatest leading men to make love in ways that set audiences aflame, and coined the term “It Girl,” which turned actress Clara Bow into the symbol of the first sexual revolution.
With Inventing the It Girl, Hallett has done nothing less than elevate the origins of the modern romance genre to a subject of serious study. In doing so, she has also reclaimed the enormous influence of one of Anglo-America’s most significant cultural tastemakers while revealing Glyn’s life to have been as sensational as any of the characters she created on the page or screen. The result is a groundbreaking portrait of a courageous icon of independence who encouraged future generations to chase their desires wherever they might lead.
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Story
Drawn from the Royal archives, including Prince Albert’s voluminous correspondence, this brilliant and ambitious book offers fascinating never-before-known details about the man and his time. A superb match of biographer and subject, Prince Albert, at last, gives this important historical figure the reverence and recognition that is long overdue.
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Excellent Bio!
- By Nancy on 04-24-24
By: A. N. Wilson
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Dead Famous
- An Unexpected History of Celebrity from Bronze Age to Silver Screen
- By: Greg Jenner
- Narrated by: Greg Jenner
- Length: 12 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Celebrity, with its neon glow and selfie pout, strikes us as hypermodern. But the famous and infamous have been thrilling, titillating, and outraging us for much longer than we might realize. Whether it was the scandalous Lord Byron, whose poetry sent female fans into an erotic frenzy; or the cheetah-owning, coffin-sleeping, one-legged French actress Sarah Bernhardt, who launched a violent feud with her former best friend; or Edmund Kean, the dazzling Shakespearean actor whose monstrous ego and terrible alcoholism saw him nearly murdered by his own audience....
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Wonderful Performance!
- By Leanna Humble on 11-01-24
By: Greg Jenner
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Mademoiselle
- Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History
- By: Rhonda Garelick
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 16 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Little black dresses. Fake pearls. Jersey knit. Blazers. Ballet flats. Today - and for nearly the last hundred years - we all see some version of Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel every time we pass a woman on the street. But few among us realize that Chanel’s role in the events of the twentieth century was as pervasive as her influence on fashion, or how deeply she absorbed and then brilliantly reimagined the historical currents around her.
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An Unlikable Portrait
- By Sara on 09-25-16
By: Rhonda Garelick
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Proust's Duchess
- How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siecle Paris
- By: Caroline Weber
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 29 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Geneviève Halévy Bizet Straus; Laure de Sade, Comtesse de Adhéaume de Chevigné; and Élisabeth de Riquet de Caraman-Chimay, the Comtesse Greffulhe--these were the three superstars of fin-de-siècle Parisian high society who, as Caroline Weber says, "transformed themselves, and were transformed by those around them, into living legends: paragons of elegance, nobility, and style."
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Enthralling, entertaining and brilliant
- By Uli Baer on 01-14-19
By: Caroline Weber
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High Society
- The Life of Grace Kelly
- By: Donald Spoto
- Narrated by: George K Wilson
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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In just seven years---from 1950 through 1956---Grace Kelly embarked on a whirlwind career that included roles in 11 movies. From the principled Amy Fowler Kane in High Noon to the thrill-seeking Frances Stevens of To Catch a Thief, Grace established herself as one of Hollywood's most talented actresses and iconic beauties.
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Find a better Grace Kelly biography, I'd skip this
- By Daniel on 08-20-12
By: Donald Spoto
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Heiresses
- The Lives of the Million Dollar Babies
- By: Laura Thompson
- Narrated by: Laura Thompson
- Length: 13 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Heiresses: Surely they are among the luckiest women on earth. Are they not to be envied, with their private jets and Chanel wardrobes and endless funds? Yet all too often those gilded lives have been beset with trauma and despair. Before the 20th century a wife’s inheritance was the property of her husband, making her vulnerable to kidnap, forced marriages, even confinement in an asylum. And in modern times, heiresses fell victim to fortune-hunters who squandered their millions.
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tough listen and tough to keep track
- By Amazon Customer on 03-29-23
By: Laura Thompson
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The Season
- A Social History of the Debutante
- By: Kristen Richardson
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 9 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Kristen Richardson, from a family of debutantes, chose not to debut. But as her curiosity drove her to research this enduring custom, she learned that it, and debutantes, are not as simple as they seem. The story begins in England 600 years ago when wealthy fathers needed an efficient way to find appropriate husbands for their daughters. Elizabeth I's exclusive presentations at her court expanded into London's full season of dances, dinners, and courting, extending eventually to the many corners of the British empire and beyond.
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Interesting Facts But Reads Like A College Paper
- By Megan Dorsey on 12-14-19
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Square Haunting
- Five Writers in London Between the Wars
- By: Francesca Wade
- Narrated by: Corrie James
- Length: 13 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Mecklenburgh Square has always been a radical address. Nestled in the heart of Bloomsbury, these townhouses have borne witness to the lives of some of the century's most revolutionary cultural figures - many of whom were extraordinary women. United by their desire to experiment with new ways of living - and, therefore, of being - these authors and thinkers were trailblazers in their commitment to creative independence.
By: Francesca Wade
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Flapper
- A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern
- By: Joshua Zeitz
- Narrated by: Daniella Rabbani
- Length: 11 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Blithely flinging aside the Victorian manners that kept her disapproving mother corseted, the New Woman of the 1920's puffed cigarettes, snuck gin, hiked her hemlines, danced the Charleston, and necked in roadsters. More important, she earned her own keep, controlled her own destiny, and secured liberties that modern women take for granted. Her newfound freedom heralded a radical change in American culture.
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Good Book, Poor Performance
- By redsrule1 on 03-16-14
By: Joshua Zeitz
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Sontag
- Her Life and Work
- By: Benjamin Moser
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 22 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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No writer is as emblematic of the American 20th century as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture.
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Cloying voice
- By Suzanne on 11-02-19
By: Benjamin Moser
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"The Rest of Us"
- The Rise of America's Eastern European Jews
- By: Stephen Birmingham
- Narrated by: Mel Foster
- Length: 18 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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The wave of Eastern European Jewish immigrants who swept into New York in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by way of Ellis Island were not welcomed by the Jews who had arrived decades before. These refugees from czarist Russia and the Polish shtetls who came to America to escape pogroms and persecution were considered barbaric, uneducated, and too steeped in the traditions of the "old country" to be accepted by the more refined and already well-established German-Jewish community. But the new arrivals were tough, passionate, and determined.
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Book 3 of 3
- By Etoile NEOhio on 11-15-22
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The Regency Years
- During Which Jane Austen Writes, Napoleon Fights, Byron Makes Love, and Britain Becomes Modern
- By: Robert Morrison
- Narrated by: Chris MacDonnell
- Length: 13 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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The Victorians are often credited with ushering in our current era, yet the seeds of change were planted in the years before. The Regency (1811-1820) began when the profligate Prince of Wales - the future King George IV - replaced his insane father, George III, as Britain's ruler. Around the regent surged a society steeped in contrasts: evangelicalism and hedonism, elegance and brutality, exuberance and despair. The arts flourished at this time with a showcase of extraordinary writers and painters such as Jane Austen, Lord Byron, the Shelleys, John Constable, and J. M. W. Turner.
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What a time!
- By BK on 06-18-19
By: Robert Morrison
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The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock
- An Anatomy of the Master of Suspense
- By: Edward White
- Narrated by: Qarie Marshall
- Length: 12 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Author Edward White explores the Hitchcock phenomenon - what defines it, how it was invented, what it reveals about the man at its core, and how its legacy continues to shape our cultural world. Illuminating different aspects of Hitchcock's life and work, the book's 12 chapters reveal something fundamental about the man he was and the mythological creature he has become, presenting not just the life Hitchcock lived, but also the various versions of himself that he projected and those projected on his behalf.
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Very Good History of Hitch
- By aaron on 07-31-21
By: Edward White
What listeners say about Inventing the It Girl
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Amazon Customer
- 09-17-22
Deeper into the business dealings than expected
I felt that the overall story, though interesting, bogged down with the details of wheeling and dealing through the beginnings of the Hollywood movie moguls and even Nell’s family in-fighting. The “It girl” creation and myth was almost overlooked and sort of tacked into the last chapter of the book. Quite a major character, Nell really doesn’t quite come off as powerful and skillful as she actually was, especially given the later prejudice against female control of production and directing.
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- Richard Register
- 09-19-22
Absolutely Captivating
Hilary Hallett has written an amazing account of an amazing life, spinning the true events of Elinor Glyn’s life into a completely entertaining and informative biography that you cannot put down. Every era of Elinor’s life is brilliantly set within a fascinating understanding of its time in history and culture so that we can literally feel the strength of this woman as she tirelessly marched on, fueled by her immense passion and heart — a pioneer of love and romance.
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