Elinor Glyn was a British novelist and scriptwriter who specialized in love fiction, which was deemed scandalous at the time, yet her works are very moderate by contemporary standards. She popularized the concept of the it-girl and had a huge impact on early 20th-century popular culture, maybe even on the careers of prominent Hollywood stars like Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson, and, most notably, Clara Bow. Elinor Sutherland was born on October 17, 1864, in St Helier, Jersey, in the Channel Islands. She was the younger daughter of Douglas Sutherland (1838-1865), a civil engineer of Scottish heritage, and his wife Elinor Saunders (1841-1937), from an Anglo-French family who had established in Canada. Her father was claimed to be linked to the Lords of Duffus. Her father died when she was two months old, and her mother went to the parental home in Guelph, Upper Canada, British North America (now Ontario), with her two daughters. Elinor was taught here by her grandmother, Lucy Anne Saunders, the daughter of Sir Richard Willcocks, an early Irish police magistrate who assisted in the suppression of the Emmet Rising in 1803.