The “sweetness of the serpent of old Nile”: Revisionist Cleopatra and Spiritual Union as Emancipation in Elinor Glyn’s Cross-Cultural Romances

Abstract

Just a year before Bradley and Cooper published Queen Mariamne, Elinor Glyn faced serious controversy when she published Three Weeks (1907)—a romance between the Englishman Paul Verdayne and an unnamed Eastern European “Lady,” whose trademark is lounging on tiger-skin rugs as she seduces Paul in multiple countries, including Italy, Greece, and Egypt. In 1907, the British Empire was at its height and about to begin its descent, as its colonial subjects began to assert independence and claim the right to govern themselves. Although Egypt would remain under the British Protectorate until 1922, the tensions that led other colonies to assert independence in the twentieth century were already present in Egypt at this time. Glyn herself had traveled to Egypt in 1901 and 1902 (Glyn, Romantic Adventure 102), participating in the imperialist culture I have already characterized as separating British administrators from the Egyptian people, a culture that fueled the first serious nationalist demonstrations in 1919 (Thompson 274). Yet, despite this context for Glyn’s novel, little of the criticism about Three Weeks focuses on the imperialist context for Glyn’s use of the romance or the role of the romance in early twentieth-century representations of women’s emancipation. Instead, critics have focused primarily on the attempts to censor Glyn’s novel because of its attention to sexual relations outside of marriage: while Paul is not married, the “Lady” is.