The Sheik

(Paperback)

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Description

'He was looking at her with fierce burning eyes that swept her until she felt that the boyish clothes that covered her slender limbs were stripped from her'.

The Sheik - to become notorious as Rudolph Valentino's greatest screen role - is an astonishing and touchingly artless expression of female sexual masochism. One of Virago's trio of turn-of-the-century erotic bestsellers - along with Elinor Glyn's Three Weeks and Ethel M. Dell's The Way of an Eagle, its willful heroine, is kidnapped and subjugated by the cruel but strangely compelling Sheik Ahmed who, it emerges, is not all that he seems.

Reviews

A high degree of literary skill * New York Times *
Edith M. Hull's novel . . . won out because it dealt with every caged woman's desire to be caught up in a love clasp by some he-man who would take the responsibility and dispose of the consequences * Variety *
I started thinking about The Sheik in the context of Fifty Shades of Grey . . . they are both stories whose heroines go on a epic journey that, rather than being romantic, concludes with a cynical reinforcement of social norms concerning both race and gender; and they were both incredible commercial successes * Book Riot *
The Sheik . . . continues to be an outstanding and highly recommended romance novel for a whole new generation of readers * Bookwatch *
Hull's novel had a profound influence on 1920s popular culture - and its legacy has been long lasting - even one hundred years on readers are still losing themselves in the desert romance aisle * Conversation *

Author Bio

Edith Maude Hull was a farmer's wife who, between 1921 and 1939, wrote thirty eight novels and a travel book, and lived very quietly.