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Elinor Glyn's British Talkies: Voice, Nationality and the Author On-Screen

Lisa Smithstead

Women: A Cultural Review, Volume: 29, Issue: 2, Pages: 169 - 187

Swansea University Author: Lisa Smithstead

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DOI (Published version): 10.1080/09574042.2018.1447041

Abstract

Existing accounts of Elinor Glyn's career have emphasized her substantial impact on early Hollywood. In contrast, relatively little attention has been paid to her less successful efforts to break into the UK film industry in the early sound period. This article addresses this underexplored peri...

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Published in: Women: A Cultural Review
ISSN: 0957-4042 1470-1367
Published: Informa UK Limited 2018
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URI: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa60748
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first_indexed 2022-08-05T11:46:45Z
last_indexed 2023-01-13T19:21:06Z
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spelling 2022-08-25T14:06:56.0261113 v2 60748 2022-08-05 Elinor Glyn's British Talkies: Voice, Nationality and the Author On-Screen 93398d7d636683958868319f391a8260 Lisa Smithstead Lisa Smithstead true false 2022-08-05 AMED Existing accounts of Elinor Glyn's career have emphasized her substantial impact on early Hollywood. In contrast, relatively little attention has been paid to her less successful efforts to break into the UK film industry in the early sound period. This article addresses this underexplored period, focusing on Glyn's use of sound in her two 1930 British films, Knowing Men and The Price of Things. The article argues that Glyn's British production practices reveal a unique strategy for reformulating her authorial stardom through the medium of the ‘talkie’. It explores how Glyn sought to exploit the specifically national qualities of the recorded English voice amidst a turbulent period in UK film production. The article contextualizes this strategy in relation to Glyn's business and personal archives, which evidence her attempts to refine her own speaking voice, alongside those of the screen stars whose careers she sought to develop for recorded sound. It suggests that the sound film was marked out as an important, exploitable new tool for Glyn within a broader context of debates about voice, recorded sound and nationality in UK culture at this time. This enabled her to portray a distinctively national brand identity through her new film work and surrounding publicity, in contrast to her appearances in American silent films. The article will show that recorded sound further allowed Glyn performatively to foreground her role as author-director through speaking cameos. This is analysed in relation to wider evidence of her practice, where she reflected on the performative qualities of the spoken voice in her writing and interviews, and made use of radio, newsreel and live performance to perfect and refine her own skills in recitation and oration. Journal Article Women: A Cultural Review 29 2 169 187 Informa UK Limited 0957-4042 1470-1367 3 4 2018 2018-04-03 10.1080/09574042.2018.1447041 COLLEGE NANME Media COLLEGE CODE AMED Swansea University Another institution paid the OA fee 2022-08-25T14:06:56.0261113 2022-08-05T12:43:54.6569017 Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences School of Culture and Communication - Media, Communications, Journalism and PR Lisa Smithstead 1
title Elinor Glyn's British Talkies: Voice, Nationality and the Author On-Screen
spellingShingle Elinor Glyn's British Talkies: Voice, Nationality and the Author On-Screen
Lisa Smithstead
title_short Elinor Glyn's British Talkies: Voice, Nationality and the Author On-Screen
title_full Elinor Glyn's British Talkies: Voice, Nationality and the Author On-Screen
title_fullStr Elinor Glyn's British Talkies: Voice, Nationality and the Author On-Screen
title_full_unstemmed Elinor Glyn's British Talkies: Voice, Nationality and the Author On-Screen
title_sort Elinor Glyn's British Talkies: Voice, Nationality and the Author On-Screen
author_id_str_mv 93398d7d636683958868319f391a8260
author_id_fullname_str_mv 93398d7d636683958868319f391a8260_***_Lisa Smithstead
author Lisa Smithstead
author2 Lisa Smithstead
format Journal article
container_title Women: A Cultural Review
container_volume 29
container_issue 2
container_start_page 169
publishDate 2018
institution Swansea University
issn 0957-4042
1470-1367
doi_str_mv 10.1080/09574042.2018.1447041
publisher Informa UK Limited
college_str Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
hierarchytype
hierarchy_top_id facultyofhumanitiesandsocialsciences
hierarchy_top_title Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
hierarchy_parent_id facultyofhumanitiesandsocialsciences
hierarchy_parent_title Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
department_str School of Culture and Communication - Media, Communications, Journalism and PR{{{_:::_}}}Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences{{{_:::_}}}School of Culture and Communication - Media, Communications, Journalism and PR
document_store_str 0
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description Existing accounts of Elinor Glyn's career have emphasized her substantial impact on early Hollywood. In contrast, relatively little attention has been paid to her less successful efforts to break into the UK film industry in the early sound period. This article addresses this underexplored period, focusing on Glyn's use of sound in her two 1930 British films, Knowing Men and The Price of Things. The article argues that Glyn's British production practices reveal a unique strategy for reformulating her authorial stardom through the medium of the ‘talkie’. It explores how Glyn sought to exploit the specifically national qualities of the recorded English voice amidst a turbulent period in UK film production. The article contextualizes this strategy in relation to Glyn's business and personal archives, which evidence her attempts to refine her own speaking voice, alongside those of the screen stars whose careers she sought to develop for recorded sound. It suggests that the sound film was marked out as an important, exploitable new tool for Glyn within a broader context of debates about voice, recorded sound and nationality in UK culture at this time. This enabled her to portray a distinctively national brand identity through her new film work and surrounding publicity, in contrast to her appearances in American silent films. The article will show that recorded sound further allowed Glyn performatively to foreground her role as author-director through speaking cameos. This is analysed in relation to wider evidence of her practice, where she reflected on the performative qualities of the spoken voice in her writing and interviews, and made use of radio, newsreel and live performance to perfect and refine her own skills in recitation and oration.
published_date 2018-04-03T04:19:07Z
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score 11.01353

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