Excerpt from Inventing the It Girl by Hilary A. Hallett, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

If many don't know that today, Glyn's successors did.

Widely honored as the premiere poet of the Jazz Age and the flapper, Fitzgerald's views on the period have been hailed as literary masterpieces and, all too often, taken to stand in for the whole. Relegated to the trash bin, the impress of Madame Glyn's much more successful romantic effusions—in terms of absolute numbers reached—have left only the faintest recognition of her authorship behind.

Interestingly, Fitzgerald recognized Glyn's position in the vanguard of projecting franker ideas about heterosexual passion—and particularly about the sexual desires of white women, which Fitzgerald himself seemed to fear and certainly never imagined from the inside out. A very young man in the 1920s, he mistakenly called Glyn, thirty-two years his senior, a contemporary. Fitzgerald was right because Elinor Glyn was, if nothing else, ever-forward looking, a woman ahead of her times.

Excerpted from Inventing the It Girl: How Elinor Glyn Created the Modern Romance and Conquered Early Hollywood. Copyright © 2022 by Hilary A. Hallett. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.