This is Eleanor. It is one of the very few photographs of her that survive, taken on a winter afternoon beside one of his cars, and look at what is standing on the bonnet at her shoulder: the little silver woman, already cast, already being sold in showrooms on three continents. Rolls-Royce registered the figure on the sixth of February, 1911. Sykes was asked whose face it was for the rest of his life and never once answered. She was introduced to everyone present that day as a secretary.
Her name was Eleanor. Eleanor Velasco Thornton. She leans from the bonnet of every Rolls-Royce ever built. The world calls her the Spirit of Ecstasy. She is the most looked-at woman in the world. Nobody ever told you she was real.
She was loved in secret for fifteen years by a man who was not free to love her. She had a daughter she was never allowed to keep. And on a bright afternoon at the end of December 1915, the sea took her.
Source: period photograph, published before 1930 and therefore public domain in the United States. The radiator badge has been retouched out. Body facts as used in the novel’s publisher A+ record.