Elinor Glyn: Intermedial Romance and Authorial Stardom

This chapter explores the career of bestselling author Elinor Glyn, a figure who moved with relatively unique fluidity across a very broad spectrum of these different forms, as a writer, adapted and filmmaker. The chapter focuses on the underexplored final stage of her film career in the early 1930s in Britain. It delves into Glyn’s archives, considering how archival sources produce a new mapping of the strategies that she and her associates formulated to break into UK cinema culture, developed on the premise that one could create an intermedial star identity through popular culture, and through the manipulation of international discourses on femininity and romance. Such non-filmic traces and materials enlarge and illuminating Glyn’s star image, suggesting the framework that she was trying to construct around her films as a vehicle for her brand and ideas. While Glyn was not wholly unique as a literary/filmic star figure during this period, the chapter argues that the fluidity of her movement across diverse forms of labour, and her creation of new forms and modes of creative influence in cinema culture, offers a distinct new access point to understandings of women’s writing, film fictions and selfhood during this period.