The Sheik

About this book

Diana Mayo is young, beautiful, wealthy--and independent. Bored by the eligible bachelors and endless parties of the English aristocracy, she arranges for a horseback trek through the Algerian desert. Two days into her adventure, Diana is kidnapped by the powerful Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan, who forces her into submission. Diana tries desperately to resist but finds herself falling in love with this dark and handsome stranger. Only when a rival chieftain steals Diana away does the Sheik realize that what he feels for her is more than mere passion. He has been conquered--and risks everything to get her back. The power of love reaches across the desert sands, leading to the thrilling and unexpected conclusion. One of the most widely read novels of the 1920s, and forever fixed in the popular imagination in the film version starring the irresistible Rudolph Valentino, The Sheik is recognized as the immediate precursor to the modern romance novel. When first published there was nothing like it: To readers the story was scandalous, exotic, and all-consuming; to such critics as the New York Times the book was "shocking," although written with "a high degree of literary skill." In the author's native England, the bestselling book was labeled "poisonously salacious" by the Literary Review and banned from some communities. But the public kept reading. The influence of The Sheik on romance writers and readers continues to resonate. Despite controversy over its portrayal of sexual exploitation as a means to love, The Sheik remains a popular classic for its representation of the so…

Themes & subjects

About the author

E. M. Hull

16 August 1880 – 11 February 1947

Edith Maude Henderson was born on 16 August 1880 in the Borough of Hampstead, London, England, UK, the daughter of Katie Thorne, of New Brunswick, Canada and James Henderson, a shipowner from Liverpool. As a child she traveled widely with her parents, even visiting Algeria—the setting of her novels. In 1899, she married Percy Winstanley Hull (b. 1869) in London and the couple moved to Derbyshire in the early 1900s. They had a daughter Cecil Winstanley Hull, who also wrote a book Six Weeks in Algeria (1930). She dabbled writing fiction in the late 1910s while her husband was away serving in World War I. The Sheik, her first effort, was first published in England in 1919 and quickly became …