E. M. (Edith Maude) Hull

Born Edith Maude Henderson on August 16, 1880, she later wrote under the name E. M. Hull. She was a British novelist whose fame took off with The Sheik in 1921, a novel that became an international bestseller and helped make her name widely known.

Hull went on to write more romance novels, often filled with high emotion, dramatic plots, and exotic settings. Her work belongs to a period when popular fiction reached large new audiences, and The Sheik remained her most famous book, especially after its success spread beyond the page.

She died on February 11, 1947. Though modern readers may approach her fiction in different ways than her first audience did, she remains an important figure in the history of bestselling romance writing.