The Special Relationship and the Allure of Transatlantic Travel in the Work of Elinor Glyn

Abstract

Winston Churchill famously said that the United Kingdom and the United States of America had a ‘special relationship’. This article takes a look at Elinor Glyn's Atlantic travel in her life and in her novels, and her visits to the United States, drawing on her archives, her memoir, magazine articles and contemporary newspaper reports of her trips. Her novel Six Days (1924) was adapted into a popular silent film which was exhibited in Europe and the United States. It is a combination of love and romance, transatlantic travel on a Cunard liner, a secret military mission and political cooperation, and is taken as an example of how the special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom has been depicted in romance novels. It draws parallels between the movies 6 Days (1923) and Titanic (1997). This article was the keynote address at the Love Across the Atlantic Conference at the University of Roehampton in June 2017.

Keywords:

• Elinor Glyn
• romance novels
• Three Weeks
• Six Days
• American divorce
• William Randolph Hearst
• Vanderbilt
• Olympic
• Titanic
• liner
• White Star/Cunard
• transatlantic travel
• 1912
• 1920s

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Deborah Jermyn for inviting us to present at the one-day Love Across the Atlantic Conference, organized by the Centre for Research in Film and Audiovisual Cultures (CRFAC) research group at the University of Roehampton and New College at the University of Alabama.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The phrase was first used by Winston Churchill in 1946.

2 Some authors’ passage was paid for by the studios; others had to fund themselves and travelled less luxuriously.

Additional information

Funding

Alexis Weedon's work in this article is an outcome of the project ‘Cross-Media Co-operation between British Novelists and Filmmakers in the 1920s and 1930s’, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AR112216].