Three Weeks

By: Elinor Glyn

Narrated by: Jennifer M. Dixon

Elinor Glyn was famous as the notorious author of several sexy Hollywood movies and novels, e.g., It, in which she described "it" as the strange magnetism that attracts both sexes. Three Weeks became her most popular novel, described as erotic, romantic, and risqué. Glyn's work in movies, novels, and articles in Cosmopolitan is considered to be influential in changes in social attitudes toward women, sex, and sexuality - even characters Lady Mary and Tom Branson acknowledged this in the latest season of Downton Abbey!

Public Domain (P)2015 Jennifer M. Dixon

Historically fascinating

We're in a high period for historical romance in books, movies and series. It's a quite different experience to read a "scandalous" novel written in its own time (1907). This aspect causes me to recommend it much more strongly than I would do on the story itself, out of context.

The story, in both plot and language, is wildly melodramatic, and the narrator's performance matches the tone. lt evokes the sweeping gestures and fluttering eyelashes of silent film, performances that seem caricaturish to modern eyes. If this were a modern novel, I likely wouldn't have finished it, and certainly I wouldn't bother to read anything else by the author. But knowing its place in time makes it a fascinating artifact--picturing Mary Crowley or Daisy Buchanan, or even a teenage Clara Bow, reading it with perhaps a paper cover to hide the title, blushing and swooning, and slipping it behind the other books on her shelf between readings? That's quite an image, and it makes it fun to read the overblown prose. The fact that it seems formulaic and overdramatic now is likely a strong indicator of its success, its position at the roots of the modern genre. Altogether, if I had been reading it in print, I wouldn't have wanted to put it down.

I recommend looking up Elinor Glyn. I'm not sure what I expected her to look like, but the pictures online weren't it!

This recording contains a number of editing errors; the annoyance they cause is tempered by the interesting glimpse they allow into the recording process.

Broken heart

I must have missed what happened to Isabella. It seems she was just forgotten. I didn’t really care for the narrator’s interpretation of the Queens voice. It sounded sickly.