Life & Wisdom Quote by Elinor Glyn

A compliment with a knife hidden in the bouquet: Glyn flatters American husbands by calling them “the best,” then immediately defines “best” as a mix of spending power and disposability. The line works because it borrows the rhetoric of national pride and twists it into a consumer review of marriage. “Generous” isn’t moral virtue here; it’s a cash register sound. Affection is implied through provisioning, as if love can be measured in allowances, gifts, and the wife’s improved standard of living. Then comes the kicker: “or can be so easily divorced.” The joke lands by treating divorce not as tragedy or scandal but as a feature - the exit option that makes the whole arrangement tolerable.

Glyn, a British novelist who helped popularize modern romantic glamour, understood the early 20th-century transatlantic fascination with America as both wealthy and unbuttoned. The subtext is class-conscious and faintly predatory: American men are useful because they underwrite luxury, and American law (and social practice) makes it easier to walk away when the fantasy dims. It’s a line aimed at a world where marriage was increasingly negotiated alongside celebrity, money, and women’s expanding autonomy - and where “American” signaled speed, modernity, and fewer inherited constraints.

The intent isn’t to shame wives for leaving; it’s to puncture the sanctimony around matrimony by exposing what polite society tries not to say: security and exit rights are power. Glyn turns the institution into a transaction, then dares the reader to laugh because the critique feels uncomfortably accurate.