Elinor Glyn, the popular early twentieth-century British romantic novelist, filmmaker, glamour icon and businesswoman, was an expert and frequent traveller across the Atlantic. Born in 1864, by 1924 she had taken twelve voyages on the Cunard–White Star luxury liners and had sailed on six different ships, including the Lusitania and the Olympic. These muchanticipated voyages were full of excitement and promise for the many celebrities who crossed on them from the old world to the new, famously attracting the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the producer Walt Disney and the film stars Ginger Rogers and Rita Hayworth during the period from the 1920s to the 1960s. For Glyn in the earlier period, such sea-going harboured romance and mystery, indulgence and danger, as her sister had survived the sinking of that other Cunard liner, the Titanic, in 1912, and had to face the subsequent government inquiry into the aftermath of disaster. In this chapter, we propose a notion of the ‘special relationship’ between the US and the UK predicated on romantic love, where tragedy and politics provide the background. Most particularly, in what follows we construct a detailed and reflective account of the years in which transatlantic travel and movement between the high-society circles of the US and UK were most central in Glyn's story. Her unique life narrative and the acclaim she won as a romantic novelist enable us to position her as a fascinating and resonantly emblematic figure in the history of the ‘special relationship’ in this period, one in which enduring preoccupations found in this discourse – around class, romance, gender, freedom and travel – are potently crystallised.

More specifically, Glyn's novel Six Days (1923), with its sense that the US offered resonant new opportunities for women, provides a rich antecedent for later representations of the transatlantic crossing, such as James Cameron's 1997 blockbuster film Titanic. Drawing on Glyn's archives, memoir, magazine articles and contemporary newspaper reports of her trips, this chapter examines how the romantic ideal of transatlantic travel and the ‘special relationships’ figured in Glyn's work and signalled a significant shift in women's status in the early twentieth century.