Three Weeks

Description

This hugely enjoyable novel, a scandalous success in 1907, is even today, startling for its enthusiastic depiction of female sensuality. One of Virago's trio of turn-of-the-century erotic best-sellers, with E M Hull's The Sheik and Ethel M Dell's The Way of an Eagle, it shows Paul Verdayne, the 'perfect young English animal', fascinated by a mysterious beauty at his Swiss hotel. Surrounded by tuberoses and tigerskins, 'the Lady' teaches him the arts of love, and gives him three weeks of tempestuous passion. Then, weeping, she renounces him and disappears, and amid high drama Paul finally discovers her august and tragic secret...

Elinor Glyn (1864-1943), who liked to 'sin on a tiger skin', was as romantically exotic as the heroines of her novels. Born in Jersey, Elinor Glyn (1864-1943) was infused with aristocratic notions by her grandmother, and grew up an exotic beauty with white skin and flaming hair. Her marriage, in 1892, was not the romantic success she had hoped for, though she later had affairs with Lord Curzon, and possibly Lord Milner. Her first novel, The Visits of Elizabeth (1906) was very successful, but real notoriety came with Three Weeks, published in 1907. She went on to write many other novels of intense emotions and luxurious settings, including the follow-up Six Days (1924). With her 1926 novella, It, she found a new term for sex-appeal, which gained universal currency with the Clara Bow film in which Glyn herself appeared. She spent much of the 1920s in Hollywood, scripting and directing movies, and writing books of advice on love and marriage. She died in 1943 and remains famous as the subject of witty verse: Would you like to Sin With Elinor Glyn On a tiger skin Or would you prefer To err with her On some other fur.

Its power was so great, in fact, that it threatened the patriarchal structures that the twentieth century was built on * Atlantic * The pioneer of erotic fiction * Daily Mail * The breakthrough, then-scandalous Three Weeks . . . awakening female erotic consciousness, after the long sleep of Victorianism -- Hilary A. Hallett * New York Times *