A Publishers Weekly Summer Reads Selection The modern romance novel is elevated to a subject of serious study in this addictively readable biography of pioneering celebrity author Elinor Glyn. Unlike typical romances, which end with wedding bells, Elinor Glyn's 1864–1943 story really began after her marriage up the social ladder and into the English gentry class in 1892. Born in the Channel Islands, Elinor Sutherland, like most Victorian women, aspired only to a good match. But when her husband, Clayton Glyn, gambled their fortune away, she turned to her pen and boldly challenged the era's sexually straightjacketed literary code with her notorious success de scandale, Three Weeks 1907 . An intensely erotic tale about an unhappily married woman's sexual education of her young lover, the novel got Glyn banished from high society but went on to sell millions, revealing a deep yearning for a fuller account of sexual passion than permitted by the British aristocracy or the Anglo- American literary establishment. In elegant prose, Hilary A. Hallett traces Glyn's meteoric rise from a depressed society darling to a world- renowned celebrity author who consorted with world leaders from St. Petersburg to Cairo to New York. After reporting from the trenches during World War I, the author was lured by American movie producers from Paris to Los Angeles for her remarkable third act.