Edith Maude Hull
See also Edith Maude Hull.
Edith Maude Henderson was born on 16 August 1880 in the Borough of Hampstead, London, England, UK, the daughter of Katie Thorne, of New Brunswick, Canada, and James Henderson, a shipowner from Liverpool.
As a child she travelled widely with her parents, even visiting Algeria, the setting of her novels. In 1899, she married Percy Winstanley Hull (b. 1869) in London and the couple moved to Derbyshire in the early 1900s. They had a daughter Cecil Winstanley Hull, who also wrote a book entitled 'Six Weeks in Algeria' (1930).
She dabbled at writing fiction in the late 1910s while her husband was away serving in World War I. 'The Sheik', her initial effort, was first published in England in 1919 and quickly became an international blockbuster, placing it among the top ten best sellers for both of the years 1921 and 1922 in the magazine 'Publishers Weekly'.
'The Sheik' quickly sold over 1.2 million copies worldwide. Sales further increased when Paramount released a film version with the same title in 1921 and this launched Rudolph Valentino into cinema immortality as the greatest lover of the silent screen.
She also wrote a follow-up to 'The Sheik', 'The Sons of the Sheik' (1925) and she wrote six other novels of the 'desert romance' variety. In 2005 these novels were still classed by some publishers as 'erotic fiction'!
In addition she wrote a travelogue 'Camping in the Sahara' (1926) that included photographs by her daughter Cecil.
She died at age 66, on 11 February 1947 in Hazelwood, in the parish of Duffield, Derbyshire.
“It is very easy to dance if you have a musical ear,and if you have been in the habit of making your body do what you want. So few people seem to be trained to make their limbs obey them. Mine have had to do as they were told since I was a child," she answered calmly.”