Elinor Glyn

Elinor Glyn
Portrait of Elinor Glyn
Born	Elinor Sutherland (1864-10-17)17 October 1864 Jersey, Channel Islands, United Kingdom
Died	23 September 1943(1943-09-23) (aged 78) Chelsea, London, England, United Kingdom
Pen name	Elinor Glyn
Occupation	novelist and scriptwriter
Language	English
Nationality	British
Period	1900–1940
Genre	Romance
Literary movement	Modernism
Notable works	Beyond the Rocks, Three Weeks, The Visits of Elizabeth
Spouse	Clayton Louis Glyn (m. 1892; d. 1915)
Children	2
Relatives	Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon (sister)

Elinor Glyn (née Sutherland; 17 October 1864 – 23 September 1943) was a British novelist and scriptwriter who specialised in romantic fiction that was considered scandalous for its time. She popularized the concept of It. Although her works are relatively tame by modern standards, she had tremendous influence on early 20th-century popular culture and perhaps on the careers of notable Hollywood stars such as Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson and Clara Bow in particular.

Elinor Sutherland was born on 17 October 1864 in Saint Helier, Jersey, in the Channel Islands. She was the younger daughter of Douglas Sutherland (1838–1865), a civil engineer of Scottish descent, and his wife Elinor Saunders (1841–1937), of an Anglo-French family that had settled in Canada. Her father was said to be related to the Lords Duffus.

Her father died when she was two months old; her mother returned to the parental home in Guelph, in what was then Upper Canada, British North America (now Ontario, Canada) with her two daughters. Here young Elinor was taught by her grandmother, Lucy Anne Saunders (née Willcocks). She was the daughter of Sir Richard Willcocks, a key figure in the early Irish police force, who had suppressed the Emmet conspiracy in 1803. Richard's brother Joseph also settled in Upper Canada, publishing one of the first opposition papers there, pursuing liberty, and dying a rebel in 1814. The Anglo-Irish grandmother instructed young Elinor in the ways of upper-class society. This training not only gave her an entrée into aristocratic circles on her return to Europe, it also led her reputation as an authority on style and breeding when she worked in Hollywood in the 1920s.