New Women and Eugenic Fictions
2005; Oxford University Press; Volume: 60; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/hwj/dbi044
ISSN1477-4569
Autores Tópico(s)Medical History and Research
ResumoAngelique Richardson, Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman, Oxford University Press, 2003; xvii + 264 pp.; £47.00 hbk; ISBN 0-19-818700-9 In 1907 the popular writer Elinor Glyn, author of some twenty-two novels and numerous screenplays, essays and short stories during a prolific writing career that spanned the period from the 1890s through to the 1930s, achieved sudden notoriety with her erotic tale of lust, seduction, adultery and exotic foreign adventure, Three Weeks. Published by Duckworth, the book sold 50,000 copies within three weeks of its initial publication. It was soon banned in Boston after being deemed obscene, gave rise to a parody by a so-called Ellova Gryn, Too Weak, became a Hollywood box-office success in 1924 and was reprinted in 1974 with an introduction by Cecil Beaton – that incurable romantic of a different persuasion. The novel was subsequently adapted for television and finally canonized as a modern classic by Virago in 1996. Glyn was, to borrow from the title of one of her biographers, ‘addicted to romance’: a point not lost on Barbara Cartland who would later condense several works by Glyn, including them in her own series, ‘Barbara Cartland's Library of Love’. Three Weeks pushed the portrayal of sex to the limits when it appeared, scandalous for its celebration of an adulterous affair initiated by an older woman. For this it has been justly remembered. It is the story of Paul Verdayne, a young Englishman sent abroad by his aristocratic parents to break up an unsuitable match with a parson's daughter. In Lucerne he meets a mysterious woman, a Balkan queen on the run from her cruel, degenerate husband. They spend three weeks together enjoying passionate sex on a tiger-skin rug amidst exotic flowers. She leaves without revealing her identity, subsequently giving birth to a son and telling Paul that he is the father. Three years later she sends for him. Soon thereafter she is killed by her jealous husband, who is subsequently killed by her personal servants. The son, conceived out of wedlock, is proclaimed king, a healthy son from healthy English stock.1 1 Elinor Glyn, Three Weeks, introduction to the Virago edition by Sally Beauman, London, 1996. See also Joan Hardwick, Addicted to Romance: the Life and Adventures of Elinor Glyn, London, 1994; Nikkianne Moody, ‘Elinor Glyn and the Invention of “It” ’, Critical Survey 15: 3, 2003, pp. 92–104.
Referência(s)