Histria Books is pleased to announce the release of IT by Elinor Glyn. This novel is published by Histria Classics, an imprint dedicated to reviving forgotten masterpieces and returning timeless stories to today’s readers. A deluxe hardcover companion volume, Clara Bow: My Story — the long-lost memoir of the original “It Girl” — is published simultaneously from our Histria A&E imprint.
Elinor Glyn’s IT launches our new Forgotten Classics series — a line of beautifully crafted deluxe hardcover editions that return culturally significant works of the past to today’s readers in a form worthy of their place in literary history. The novel first gave the world the idea of the “It” girl. Set in a sharply observed Jazz Age world, it follows a self-made tycoon and a proud young woman whose remaining social power rests on the one thing she still controls: herself. Around them swirl old money, new fortunes, drugs, scandal, and a media machine just learning how to manufacture desire.
What feels startlingly modern is the book’s eye for performance: how charisma works, how image is built, and what it costs to live as the object of other people’s appetite. Glyn writes about sex, money, and status with a frankness that still stings, but she is just as interested in female agency and moral compromise. IT is not a period curiosity; it reads like an origin story for our influencer age.
Readers who know Clara Bow as the screen’s first “It Girl” will recognize how this story seeded her legend, yet the novel itself is about something knottier and more adult: who really owns your magnetism, and what it costs to spend it.
Elinor Glyn (née Sutherland, 1864–1943) was a British novelist and screenwriter whose romantic fiction scandalized polite society while shaping modern popular culture. Writing frankly about desire within strict moral times, she coined and popularized the idea of the “It” girl. Her work and ideas helped define early Hollywood glamour and influenced stars such as Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson, and, especially, Clara Bow.
