The Desert Healer

Edith Maud Hull (1880-1947) was a British writer of romance novels published under the pseudonym E M Hull. She is best known for The Sheik which became an international bestseller in 1921 and is credited with sparking a hugely popular revival of the "desert romance" genre of romantic fiction. The daughter of a Canadian mother and Liverpool shipowner father, originally from New York, she travelled widely with her parents as a child, including a visit to Algeria, the setting of her novels. In 1899 she married Percy Winstanley Hull, a civil engineer and later prize-winning pig farmer, and the couple moved to the Hull family estate in Derbyshire in the early 1900s and had one daughter. Hull began writing fiction while her husband was away serving in the First World War, and to her great surprise her first effort, The Sheik, published in England in1919, was a huge success, quickly selling over 1.2 million copies worldwide and appearing among Publishers Weekly's top ten bestsellers for both 1921 and 1922. Sales increased when Paramount released a film version in 1921 which launched Rudolph Valentino into cinema immortality as the greatest "lover" of the silent screen. By 1923 the novel had gone through over a hundred editions, outselling all other bestsellers combined. Hull continued to write into the 1930s and her 1925 novel The Sons of the Sheik was also a tremendous success, as was the film version, again starring Valentino in what was to be his last film. This novel was first published in 1923.