Life & Wisdom Quote by Elinor Glyn

The line lands like a jeweled pin: glittering, delicate, and meant to prick. Elinor Glyn invokes "blue blood" not to worship aristocracy but to expose its quietly absurd costs. The joke is in the genteel understatement - "I have wondered sometimes" - as if the speaker has merely misplaced a glove, not inherited a whole system of social expectations. By pairing herself with "grandmamma", Glyn tightens the satire: lineage becomes a family heirloom you are expected to display, along with its accompanying stiffness, fragility, and worry about propriety.

The intent is less revolutionary than revelatory. Glyn, who made her career selling high-society glamour to mass readers, understands that status is both costume and cage. "Really blue blood" is a wink at how performative the concept is: blood is blood, but the adverb "really" signals a class ritual so intense it circles back into comedy. The "disadvantages" hover deliberately unnamed, letting readers fill in the penalties: constrained choices, suffocating decorum, loveless matches, the terror of appearing common, the inability to admit desire without laundering it into etiquette.

Context matters: Glyn wrote in an era when old aristocratic authority was being dented by modernity - money, tabloids, changing sexual mores. Her fiction often trafficked in "It"-style magnetism and social aspiration, but this line lets the sheen crack. It flatters the upper class by acknowledging its pedigree while slyly inviting everyone else to laugh at the self-inflicted misery of those who must keep up the pose.