The Sheik (Annotated)

E. M. Hull's The Sheik is a landmark of early twentieth-century popular romance, a desert adventure whose melodramatic intensity helped define the "sheik" subgenre. Centering on Diana Mayo and the imperious Ahmed Ben Hassan, the novel blends erotic peril, captivity narrative, and exotic travel fantasy in a prose style at once lush, sensational, and psychologically direct. Its literary context is i...