Still, they played the game, and looked the part, Nell especially distinctive with her “red hair, milk-white skin, green eyes, and a waist that looked small enough to snap in two.” At 27, she married a dissolute English landowner named Clayton Glyn. Raised in Canada and on the shipwreck-strewn island of Jersey, they were rigidly schooled in Victorian strictures of class and gender - especially the hard truth that dowry-less social climbers could not break the rules like true aristocrats. Nell and her older sister Lucy, who became a successful couturier, knew from rocky shores. Hallett writes in her new biography, “ Inventing the It Girl,” the modern Nell would forge a long, lucrative career out of this raw material: the glamour and scandal of the upper classes, and pulsing below, the inadmissible longing - her own and her readers’ - to be swept away by passion without dying on the rocks. courtesy liveright publishing/Alamy Stock PhotoĪs a child haunting her stepfather’s library, Elinor “Nell” Glyn, the queen of 20th century romance, devoured stories about fast-and-loose royals like Charles II’s mistress, her near namesake Nell Gwynne, who pursued her own desires without punishment.
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