Sheik

by E. M. Hull

Overview

Are you coming in to watch the dancing, Lady Conway?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781412164467
Publisher:	eBooksLib
Publication date:	04/21/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	249 KB

About the Author

E.M. Hull (1880-1947) was an English romance novelist. Born in London, Hull was the daughter of a Canadian mother and a father from New York City. As a girl, Hull visited Algeria with her family, providing the setting for many of her successful novels, including The Sheikh (1919), an international bestseller. Notoriously reclusive, Hull settled in Derbyshire with her husband, a civil engineer and pig farmer, with whom she had a daughter, Cecil Winstanley Hull. The Sheikh served as source material for a popular 1921 silent film of the same name by Paramount, leading to the sale of millions of copies of Hull’s novel.

Editorial Reviews

Most remembered as the source for the famous Valentino movie (of the same name), The Sheik kicks off a new series from the Univ. of Pennsylvania. They intend to reprint genre novels from the distant past, and have begun with this unabashed romance, first published in 1919, and here offered without an explanatory introduction or afterword, which it most definitely needs. How else to justify a book of such silly melodrama, full of enough "orientalist" racism to make Edward Said go ga-ga, and enough misogynist pathology to drive Susan Brownmiller to distraction. The plot is simple enough: a beautiful young Englishwoman—wealthy, adventurous, and unmoved by men—is captured in the Algerian desert by a handsome and muscular sheik who not only tames her and rapes her, but inspires her to love him without reserve. The purple passages abound; the plot mires in the sand dunes. But what is this Middle Eastern soap opera beyond a historically curious piece of schlock? An anticipation of the Stockholm Syndrome, perhaps? Or simply more fodder for those students of anything and everything: the so-called cultural-studies crowd.

Kirkus Reviews

"The Sheik . . . continues to be an outstanding and highly recommended romance novel for a whole new generation of readers."—Bookwatch

"This was the first real romance novel I ever read and it changed my life."—Jayne Ann Krentz

From the Publisher