Sheik
Product details
- ISBN 9781860490934
- Dimensions: 127 x 203mm
- Publication Date: 08 Feb 1996
- Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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ONE OF THE MOST WIDELY READ AND BESTSELLING NOVELS OF THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY
'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 wilful heroine, is kidnapped and subjugated by the cruel but strangely compelling Sheik Ahmed who, it emerges, is not all that he seems.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilisation as we know it. 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 social order of its time, capturing contemporary attitudes toward colonialism as well as female power and independence that still strike a chord with readers today.
Edith Maude Hull (1880-1947) was born in Hampstead, London. As a child, she travelled widely with her parents, even visiting Algeria the setting of her novels. In 1899, she married Percy Winstanley Hull and the couple moved to Derbyshire. They had a daughter 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 the First World War. The Sheik, her first effort, quickly became an international blockbuster, placing among Publishers Weekly's top ten best sellers for both of the years 1921 and 1922. Hull's volume quickly sold over 1.2 million copies worldwide. Sales further increased when Paramount released a film version of The Sheik in 1921, which launched Rudolph Valentino into cinema immortality as the greatest 'lover' of the silent screen.
