E. M. (Edith Maude) Hull

Born Edith Maud Henderson in London on August 16, 1880, she wrote under the name E. M. Hull and became a major figure in popular romance fiction. She is most closely associated with The Sheik (1919), a novel that became an international bestseller and later reached an even wider audience through the famous 1921 film adaptation.

Hull’s fiction is often linked with the rise of the "desert romance" craze. Her stories usually placed intense emotional drama in exoticized North African settings, and their popularity showed just how strongly mass readers of the time responded to escapist, high-stakes romance.

She died on February 11, 1947. While modern readers often approach her work through the lens of its historical moment, her name remains closely tied to one of the most influential popular romances of the early 1900s.