Props

I stumbled across a review of Hilary G. Hallett’s Inventing the It Girl, a biography of the potboiler novelist Elinor Glyn, who is credited with inventing the form and style of the Hot Romance in the early 20th century. You’d likely recognize the image of a person in a sleek gown of silk velvet, languidly playing with a long strand of pearls around her neck (and possibly clutching a rose between her teeth), as an early icon of sexually-emancipated modern womanhood. Who among us can’t ident...