Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 Off to the Pictures: Cinema, Fiction and Interwar Culture
- 2 Screen Fantasies: Tie-ins and the Short Story
- 3 Middlebrow Modernity: Class, Cinema-going and Selfhood
- 4 Wander, Watch, Repeat: Jean Rhys and Cinema
- 5 Film Talk: C. A. Lejeune and the Female Film Critic
- 6 Elinor Glyn: Intermedial Romance and Authorial Stardom
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Elinor Glyn: Intermedial Romance and Authorial Stardom
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 September 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 Off to the Pictures: Cinema, Fiction and Interwar Culture
- 2 Screen Fantasies: Tie-ins and the Short Story
- 3 Middlebrow Modernity: Class, Cinema-going and Selfhood
- 4 Wander, Watch, Repeat: Jean Rhys and Cinema
- 5 Film Talk: C. A. Lejeune and the Female Film Critic
- 6 Elinor Glyn: Intermedial Romance and Authorial Stardom
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
[H]ad Hollywood had never existed, Elinor Glyn would have invented it.
A. LoosThe book has thus far profiled an array of forms and modes of women's cinema writing. While some writers, like Holtby, worked across media, others, like Rhys, were more concretely focused upon literary cultures, bringing cinema into this discourse. Bestselling author Elinor Glyn stands as a figure who moved with relatively unique fluidity across a very broad spectrum of these different forms, as a writer, adaptor and filmmaker. Across the silent and early sound era, women were active in a variety of creative roles within the international film industries, as new research ventures such as the Women Film Pioneers Project are increasingly illuminating: women worked as writers, editors, producers, directors, costume designers and performers, to name just a few of their creative roles. Glyn represented a highly prolific and culturally prominent figure within this workforce, forging a very successful transatlantic literary and filmic career, in which she penned several bestselling fictions and played a significant role in helping to produce a range of lucrative feature films. As such, she offers rich case study for exploring diverse intersections between film, fiction and women's writing across the entire interwar period, and proved to be a figure who played a significant role in shaping early Hollywood, and later British, discourses on romance, female stardom and glamour.
Anita Loos's comment about Glyn, quoted above from her 1966 autobiography, speaks to the powerful associations that the novelist sparked in transatlantic interwar cultural consciousness. Glyn's connection to Hollywood was cemented not just in the adaptation of her works, but in the active hand she took in bringing these to the screen, and in shaping and creating Hollywood star personas. It also appropriately equates a notion of self-invention with Glyn. Across her career she was able to craft and re-craft a cultural persona founded on her conception of herself as a champion for the importance of fantasy and romantic imagination in women's lives, crossing national media cultures to disseminate her philosophies on romance. She worked in both the US and UK film industries, published popular fiction, magazine stories and articles, ‘supervised’ several films, directed two of her own, set up her own film company, was involved in adapting her own novels and stories and wrote original material for the screen.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Off to the PicturesCinemagoing, Women's Writing and Movie Culture in Interwar Britain, pp. 156 - 188Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016