Elinor Glyn was born on 17th October 1864 in Saint Helier, Jersey. She was the youngest daughter of a civil engineer, Douglas Southerland, and his wife Elinor Saunders. Elinor’s father died when she was only two months old, leaving her mother alone with Elinor and her older sister Lucy Christiana.
After the death of their father, Elinor and her sister were taken to Canada, the place of their mother’s parental home. There they were home-schooled by their grandmother, Lucy Anne Saunders, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat, who taught the girls the ways of society and upper-class etiquette. This education proved to be extremely useful for both sisters, Lucy going on to become Lady Duff-Gordon and successful fashion designer “Lucile”, and Elinor becoming an authority on style and breeding in Hollywood. In 1871, Glyn’s mother remarried and the family returned to Jersey to live at their stepfather’s house.
In 1892, Elinor married a wealthy landowner with whom she had two children, Margot and Juliet. The marriage was not a successful one and she began to have a string of affairs with various British aristocrats. One particular relationship, with Lord Alistair Innes Ker, caused a great scandal after the publication of her novel Three Weeks, which was allegedly inspired by their liaison.
Elinor Glyn began her writing career in 1900 and was a pioneer of the risqué and romantic fiction genre. She went on to write many popular books such as Beyond the Rocks (1906), Love’s Blindness (1926), and It (1927), in which she coined the term ‘It’, meaning the animal magnetism that some individuals possess.
In 1920 she moved to Hollywood to work in the movie industry as a script-writer. Glyn also helped develop the careers of such stars as Gloria Swanson and Clara Bow.
Elinor Glyn died at the age of 78 in Chelsea, London in 1943.