Palace of the Pomegranate: The noble yet savage palm tree

And now the thrilling finale! Sadly, this is (I feel) not one of Winspear’s best romances and it actually ends quite abruptly.  But let’s go back to where we left off…

Grace is pointing a gun at Kharim, threatening to shoot him unless he gives her an escort out of the desert and back to Reza Shahr. “She would be unafraid to use it, for she was Grace Tillerton Wilde, and the derring-do and ruthless will of Jonas were in the marrow of her shapely bones” (112).  The derring-do of a toffee baron, that is.

Kharim tries to talk her out of it, but ultimately he takes her by surprise and disarms her. Grace tries to run away, but he catches her. He puts her to bed and then she reveals that she was never 'intimate', shall we say, with her husband. Once Kharim hears this, he refers to her as “now mon enfant rather than ma belle” (120). As I suggested previously, Grace’s virginity marks her as not a ‘woman’, despite her age. Now she’s even been downgraded from attractive male youth to ‘my child’. 

After this, nothing much seems to change. Grace and Kharim argue. Kharim gives her a beautiful brooch. Kharim compares Grace to a thoroughbred. Grace thinks about the cruel, cruel desert. And she learns that they’re on their way to Kharim’s palace: the titular Palace of the Pomegranate. She’s also taken to calling Kharim ‘seigneur’ (which harkens back to The Sheik’s monseigneur). So now she calls him seigneur and he calls her mon enfant. 

One day, when they are almost at the palace, Grace and Kharim are riding and arguing and she has finally had enough. She whips her horse into running into the desert. But her escape attempt is not successful. Very strikingly, Winspear writes:

“Her confidence billowed like her windswept cloak…and then came sudden and shocking deflation as Beauty [her horse], in his wild free motion, stumbled upon one of the sandstone rocks half buried in the sand” (143). 

Beauty breaks his leg and Grace has to simply wait there until Kharim finds her. As in The Sheik, it is the horse that suffers, as Kharim has to shoot it. I wonder if there’s something to the fact that in both novels horses are compared to women and then bear the brunt of women’s efforts to escape patriarchal power. Psychoanalytic speculation welcome!

And then this incident is capped with Grace riding back to camp in Kharim’s arms “like a child” (150).

At last the tribe has reached their encampment outside of Kharim’s palace.  This is the occasion of Shalena’s wedding to Achmed. Grace dresses up and thinks that she looks “almost as if she had stepped out of the canvas of an Ingres painting” (155) – another reference to past representations of the Orient. Kharim, she thinks, is “as noble and savagely graceful as the tall palm trees” (159). I’m not sure I think of palm trees as ‘savage’, but that could just be me.

Anyway, the wedding goes well, Shalena is very excited and Achmed is happy. When Achmed carries her out of the tent, “Grace saw Shalena suddenly tighten her arms about Achmed’s neck. Love for him had overcome her moment of terror, as love was meant to do” (167). Grace begins to wonder what her own feelings about Kharim are, exactly. And just as Grace is wondering, she feels like Kharim is planning to get rid of her. He has said that he will take her back to Reza Shahr after all. Good old push and pull! 

The palace is beautiful, as we might have expected.  Sheik’s palaces in sheik romances are never ill-kept, moldering heaps.  Grace thinks that “she had surely found Sheba’s garden at last, only to know that one day soon she would be turned out of it” (174). She believes that Kharim could never love a woman “not of his own heritage” (174), although he’s never said anything of the kind. 

But then she has a conversation with a second Eastern woman with a speaking part! This is an older woman, Hathaya, who is Kharim’s housekeeper. She reveals that Kharim’s mother was one lady Rachel. 

Vindicated! My ability to predict plots is pretty good, if I do say so myself. Kharim’s mother is indeed Rachel Leah Bourne, the well-known travel writer, whose books inspired Grace to travel into the desert . 

Rachel and Kharim’s father had met and married, but he died in a military skirmish while she was pregnant. She returned to the Palace and raised Kharim under the guardianship of his grandfather, the old khan. Hathaya speculates that because of his mother’s Englishness, “it is inevitable that [Kharim] will have eyes for an English woman” (183).

This gives Grace hope. She dresses for dinner in a Persian-style outfit: trousers and shift and veil. And Kharim comes to dinner dressed in a European dress-suit. It’s like Grease, when Sandy and Danny try to fit in with what they think the other wants by dressing in tight tight pants and a cardigan, respectively! Sadly, no singing follows.

Instead, they go to the roof. They stand there and stare into each other’s eyes and without anyone saying anything, everything is apparently resolved: “like a star bursting into stunning silver pieces the truth struck at them” (190). They kiss and Grace thinks that “he had been born of an English mother, but in his heart and his bones he was a Persian, of a different creed and culture…yet Grace knew as he held her that they were one heart, one soul, mingling forever in their two bodies” (190). The End.

This was an interesting book, if emotion-wise a bit all over the place. It didn’t feel like a book set in the 1970s (despite the cover’s '70s aesthetic) – it really felt like it could have been set at the same time as Hull’s The Sheik. The hero does turn out to be ‘actually’ Persian, while still having the ‘not really’ of an English mother. I’m looking forward to seeing how the next book deals with this...

Next up: a 1920s magazine post! I feel like I haven’t done one in forever!

Palace of the Pomegranate: A woman is like a candy

There’s an Eastern woman with a speaking part in this (actually two, we’ll meet the other one later): Shalena, who is “darkly pretty” and helps Grace in the camp with her toilette.  Grace assumes that she is Karim’s “desert kadin” but in fact Shalena is engaged to one of the other men – Achmed, who is a wonderful cook. She doesn’t really get a story arc, but she seems very nice.

Grace is thinking about how to avoid having sex with Karim, something which she assumes will be an imminent issue. Her plan involves using the gun which she earlier threatened her husband with. 

This book is a bit oddly structured because while she’s worrying about this she also stares at herself in the mirror and muses about her past. But we’re about halfway through the book, which is a bit late for mirror-staring.  It does provide the opportunity for one of the more absurd lines in the book, when Grace is thinking about how her grandfather (the candy baron) never really cared about her: “Always for him Grace had been an object to improve upon…as if like a candy she could be made sweeter, choicer, more decorative and lucrative” (92).

Ladies are like toffees!

Grace, like Diana when in the Sheik’s tent, takes the opportunity to peruse Karim's shelves. She can’t help but admire his taste in décor; his taste in novels also surprises her, as “the fact that he was educated was more of an affront to Grace than if he had been a truly wild son of the desert” (94).

When Karim returns, he’s shaved off his beard: “he was clean-shaven, and the hard, sculptured look of his features was both fascinating and terrifying.  His eyes were a deep, brilliant green, lambent as a leopard’s in the blue light of the hanging lamps” (95). Grace argues with him incessantly, justifiably given that he’s basically kidnapped her, but narratively it just makes her seem like an argumentative person. She snipes at him, calling him a villain and then he calmly mocks her by saying “so that is what we are, eh? The sinner and the saint” (95) and then tells her that he hopes she’ll enjoy the dinner

Grace and Karim do a lot of talking at each other in this book. At one point he even quotes Oscar Wilde at her: “Here you are ‘whitely wanton with a velvet brow. A mouth like a pomegranate cut with a knife of ivory.’ The man who wrote those lines – perhaps to a woman, perhaps to a boy – had your surname, Lady Wilde.  He might well have had your image in his brilliant, strangely romantic mind.  In breeches and shirt, with your hair partly concealed, you look a boy who might tempt a satyr. In your silk, mon puritain, you look a woman to tempt a saint” (102).

This is very interesting. Grace is boyish here both as a reference to Diana’s boyishness in The Sheik and for the same reasons as Diana was boyish. She’s independent, virginal and uninterested in love; she is not womanly, then, but also beyond being a girl (and no, not like Britney Spears). 

I haven’t been able to figure out what Oscar Wilde work this is a quote from. Wilde does have a collection of fairy tales called House of Pomegranate, but this is not from that. In fact, the first part of the line, “whitely wanton with a velvet brow” appears to be from Love’s Labour’s Lost (by another man rumored to have written some poetry to perhaps a woman, perhaps a young man). 

In any case, this passage is interesting because it brings in the suggestion of homosexuality, something which has been associated with ‘the Orient’ in a number of Western works. This doesn’t go anywhere in this particular novel, but it’s still interesting…

Anyway, after more sniping at each other, Karim tells Grace that he’s not intending to “use brute force” on her (that is, rape her), just to wait around until she wants to have sex with him. While keeping her effectively a captive. This differentiates him from The Sheik, but still keeps him pretty sketchy. 

But he believes in destiny, apparently. And at this point he thinks she’s had sex with Tony, her husband, so he wonders why she objects to getting involved with him, when she didn’t object to her arranged loveless marriage. Karim speculates that “the marriage to Lord Wilde was more suitable for you than a marriage founded on emotion.  It provided you with the freedom to keep your heart to yourself, and your body, not to mention your soul. Love unlocks the heart, does it not? Love uncovers the body. Love enslaves the soul” (110).

It’s not clear here whether Karim is implying that he’s in love with Grace. He never really says so, but maybe we’re supposed to infer that? But Grace doesn’t think so, she thinks he’s talking about lust.

And then she tries to shoot him.

Does she succeed? Find out in the final installment on Thursday!

Palace of the Pomegranate: the romantic vet!

Late post! Well, this is not an auspicious beginning to my new posting schedule. I’ll have to step it up.

Back to Palace of the Pomegranate…Tony, Grace, Kharim and the whole expedition start to head back to Reza Shahr, despite Kharim’s warnings that they may be headed into a dangerous sand storm.    

Everyone is an idiot.

During the ride, Grace makes some pretty big assumptions about Kharim.  For instance, while she’s embarrassed that Kharim must be able to tell that Tony hit her the night before, she thinks that “Kharim was a Persian, and for him a woman was an obedient slave or she was nothing.  He was too primitive at heart to know or care that women needed to be loved for more than their bodies” (52).  She has not exchanged more than ten words with this guy! Why does she assume this?

The sand storm begins to arrive, “like a savage tiger with a lashing tail and teeth bared to bite them” (53) – again with the big cats. This sparks another argument between Grace and Tony. He makes to strike her with his whip (!), but instead startles his horse, which runs off into the storm. I think we can all predict how the problem of a married heroine is going to be solved here.

Grace wants to ride off after Tony (why?!), but Kharim stops her. They wait out the storm together and then Kharim sends some of his men out to find Tony. While the men are searching, Grace becomes suspicious about Kharim’s identity (it’s obvious now that he’s not just a guide) and he reveals that is indeed a leader, not a guide. He had seen Grace before her marriage, when she visited a Persian wedding with her grandfather, and was taken with her. 

Kharim has a…poetic…way about him. Grace describes him as “saying the sort of things no man had ever said to her” (64). When Grace says that he must have been born in the desert, he replies:

“True, I was born in the very heart of it, and the first thing I saw when my eyes were fully open was a desert star.  I would say that it has led me ever since on a quest for – heaven” (64). 

Which I guess no one has ever said to me either? 

As predicted, the men return with Tony’s body strapped to their horse.  He’s suffocated in the sandstorm and they bury him there in the desert. Grace is, understandably, feeling pretty conflicted about this and also pretty guilty. She feels like it was her fault, that she brought Tony to the desert, although I have to say that I’m not sure how guilty she should feel since he was (only allegedly I suppose) trying to kill her.

Anyway, in her distraction Grace almost sprains her ankle, leading Kharim to chide her about taking care of injuries in the harsh desert. And to reveal that he is…a qualified vet! Just like The Sheik! It’s an odd continuity for Winspear to insert into the book, since that qualified vet bit never did make that much sense to me. It didn't seem particularly romantic or revealing of East/West or man/woman relations. But obviously it means something to her. Speculations anyone? 

Anyway, the fact that he’s a qualified vet does give Kharim the opportunity to mention the ever popular comparison between women and horses:

“I am a qualified vet, milady, and you would be surprised how much a highly strung filly and a woman have in common.  They both have emotional natures and fine-boned ankles” (68). Well, he does have a sense of humor!

Anyway, Kharim has been leading the party not back to Reza Shahr but instead further into the desert – he says towards to the garden of Sheba. Kharim tells Grace that now that her husband is dead, he is in charge of her; apparently, it is the custom that “when a woman loses her husband in the desert, the head of a caravan then becomes responsible for her” (70). Grace is dubious about this and threatens him with jail. 

It seems that Kharim has planned to take Grace away with him all along. She’s just that beautiful. That’s how she’s attracted the notice of the man who turns out to be “Kharim Khan, and the paramount chief of my tribe, the Haklyt Rohim.  In this the Land of the Peacock Throne and the King of Kings, I am more powerful than even you may imagine. For me the abduction of a mere girl is a bagatelle.  I could be assassinated at any time, having enemies who hate me as you could never dream of hating anyone, even such as me, a man of a desert nation who saw you – and wanted you!” (73). It’s like this dialogue was written in the 1920s! It’s very striking.  I don’t remember Violet Winspear’s other romances being like this.

Kharim “the paramount chief” then takes Grace back to his tribe’s camp, where he installs her in the ‘harem section’ of his tent. What awaits her? Will she ever escape? We'll have to wait until Monday to find out...

Palace of the Pomegranate: A homage to The Sheik?

Hello readers! Sadly the new school term is almost upon us. I’m teaching an introductory course on Sociocultural Anthropology this term (yay!), so I won’t have as much free time for the blog as I did in the summer. I’ll be too busy writing lectures and applying for jobs. But don’t worry, I’m not giving up – I still have literally millions of books to read! I’m just going to switch to posting twice a week (Mondays and Thursdays) instead of three times a week. I'll post 1920s stuff every time I finish a sheik romance. Hopefully that schedule is not too optimistic of me…

And now on to a new book! Next up is another romance by Violet Winspear: The Palace of the Pomegranate, a Harlequin Presents novel from 1974. I think this time we’re going to get a romance with a ‘real’ sheikh – except he’s not actually Arab but Persian and not a ‘sheikh’, per se. But close enough.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Palace of the Pomegranates has a lot of references to E. M. Hull’s The Sheik.  It begins with the heroine being described by an elderly woman at a party of ex-pats, just like in The Sheik. In this case, the party is in Reza Shahr. Perhaps my googling skills are slowly going downhill, but I can’t find a city called Reza Shahr. Only a neighbourhood in Mashhad, Iran? In any case, the book never mention the name Iran; everyone always refers to Persia. It’s interesting how blurry the geography and political context get. This is something that also happens in romances set in the US (so many made-up American small towns), but it does have a different effect.

 

Anyway, the rumour is that Grace Tillerton, “heiress to the fortune earned by the Tillerton toffee factories,” is still a virgin, despite her recent marriage to impoverished aristocratic playboy Tony Wilde (Wilde by name, Wilde by nature, I presume). Grace married Tony purely to please the stern grandfather who raised her (just like The Sheik’s heroine Diana was raised by a stern older brother). And Tony married her for the money.

Having a heroine married to someone who it’s fairly clear will not end up the hero is unusual for a romance. Usually if the heroine’s been married (which was not out of the question in 1970s romances), she’s already divorced or widowed by the time the romance starts. But Grace’s husband is still alive and kicking. 

1970s independent woman!

The cover of the Harlequin Presents edition evades the hero question entirely, by just having this striking drawing of the heroine.  It’s very 70s! I actually love it! 

This guy?

I can’t tell in the Mills and Boon edition who the man in the drawing is intended to be. Is it Tony Wilde or is it Kharim Khan (you’ll find out who he is soon)?

Grace, like Diana, is not a fan of love or marriage. She asks a young Officer who’s a little in love with her “Has there ever been a man who loved with a single hunger, wanting no one else but his wife? I doubt it” (8). She muses that “men liked to please themselves, but they didn’t really consider that women had the right to indulge their longing and desires.  They were chattels, whichever way the situation was looked at” (12). 

Grace and Tony are planning a trip into the desert to find the legendary lost Garden of Sheba, where “Sheba was said to have made love with Solomon” (9). This confuses our location even further, since the Queen of Sheba was maybe from around Yemen?  Or eastern North Africa? And King Solomon lived in Jerusalem?

Anyway, Grace is warned against going into the desert by a number of the expats. They say she’s too frail for the desert, that there might be dangerous men in the desert (the threat of rape by terrible foreigners, as in The Sheik) and, more unusually, that her husband might be planning to kill her for her money and the desert would be a great place to do it!

In this novel, Winspear has brought the conflicts in British gender relations which in The Sheik are in the recent past (the abusive husband who is Ahmed’s biological father) into the present and thus more direct comparison with ‘Oriental’ gender relations. We might think that Eastern men and women have arranged marriages and unequal relations (and Grace does, to a certain extent), but look – this British couple has an arranged marriage and there’s nothing more unequal than (perhaps) plotting to kill your wife. And both of these cases are removed (to different extents) from the most readers’ day-to-day lives, given their location in the worlds of the rich and aristocratic.

But Grace refuses to be warned. She is infatuated with the idea of the desert: “it may be a savage place, but at least it isn’t as uncivilized as our so-called modern society. […] out there in the desert everything is so open – so free and gold and blue” (13). And she scoffs at the notion that someone would try to kidnap her (“that old chestnut about hot-natured nomads,” as she describes it). 

And so Tony and Grace set off into the desert, led by their Persian guide Kharim. We meet him at last! At first he’s innocuously passing himself off as a guide, if one with "the look of a leader" and eyebrows with "an almost Mephistophelean slant to them" (34). As they finally set off into the desert, Grace is very very excited: “As Grace thought of being in the real desert, with nothing but sand all around them like the rough pelt of a tiger, she felt quivers of excitement coursing through her body” (26). Very excited.

Grace thinks about how she first found out about the lost garden of Sheba – in the autobiography of a British woman Rachel Leah Bourne who had spent most of her life in the East and then disappeared, presumed dead.  I’m thinking this Rachel Leah Bourne was not dead, but is in fact: Kharim’s mother! That’s my bet. Any takers?

Grace has enjoyed her first day in the desert and they set up camp at an oasis. She and Tony spar.  Grace is rude to their guide for no particular reason and thinks that “the eyes of a Persian leopard would flash like that only seconds before it leapt upon its prey and tore it to pieces” (35). Winspear really loves her big cats. 

Kharim recommends that they not break camp the next day, because one of the porters believes there’s a storm on the way, but the couple do nothing but argue with him that it looks fine!  It’s not really clear to me why Tony and Grace have hired a local guide if they planned to disregard all of his advice about super dangerous sandstorms. Why bother?

Later on in the evening Tony comes to Grace’s tent drunk and tells her he wants to have sex. She tries to kick him out and he hits her across the face. Just as he is about to cap it off with a kick in the ribs, she points her gun at him and threatens to shoot. This indignity is last straw for Grace and she offers Tony even more money to leave her alone and get a divorce. 

But first they have to get out of the desert. Against their guide’s warnings, the next morning they set out back towards the city. But a storm is on its way… 

Will they survive the swirling sands? And what is Kharim’s interest in all this mess anyway? Next installment – Thursday!

Spoiler: Spanish ladies

Week three of the blog! Already this is longer than any other blog I’ve written! Do I get a medal? A cookie?

For real now: the conclusion of The Sheik…

Sheik Ahmed had just rescued Diana Mayo from the Robber Sheik Ibraheim Omair, but in the process been badly wounded. As they all ride back to the camp, Diana is worried about Ahmed, who is still unconscious. Once back, Raoul Saint Hubert (who is also a doctor?) overhears Ahmed’s semi-conscious feverish mutterings recapping his relationship with Diana, which end with “Diane, Diane, how could I know how much you meant to me? How could I now that I should love you? […] Diane, Diane, it is all black. I cannot see you, Diane, Diane…” (240).

The next day, Diana and Raoul are sitting by the unconscious Ahmed’s bedside and she distractedly comments on Ahmed’s hands: “His hand is so big for an Arab’s” (243). Ah yes, that well-known racial stereotype of Arab men having small hands. Is this a thing? Or is E. M. Hull just obsessed with hands?

Anyway, this off-hand comment leads Raoul to finally reveal the mystery of Sheik Ahmed. He answers: “He is not an Arab […] He is English” (243). So that explains the hands, then!

Then begins the fascinating story of Ahmed’s parentage:

His father was an English peer, the Earl of Glencaryll. His mother was a Spanish woman. As Raoul explains it, “many of the old noble Spanish families have Moorish blood in their veins, the characteristics crop up even after centuries. It is so with Ahmed, and his life in the desert has accentuated it” (244).  I’m not sure what characteristics this long-lost “Moorish blood” is supposed to explain.  It can’t be Ahmed’s stubbornness, his temper or his tendency to mistreat women, since we soon learn that his father had all of those. Is it his skill with horses? Looking good in a djellaba?

Long ago, Raoul’s father was great friends with the old sheik, Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan, “a wonderful man, very enlightened, with strong European tendencies. As a matter of pure fact he was not too much in sympathy with the French form of administration as carried on in Algeria, but he was not affected sufficiently by it to make any real difference” (245).

Raoul’s mother had recently died (everyone’s mother is always dead in this book), and Raoul’s father had gone to stay with the old Sheik to take his mind off his grief. One evening some of the Sheik’s men found a woman wandering in the desert. She was young (around 19), pregnant and unwell and wouldn’t answer any questions about herself. She basically spent all her time crying.

She and her son, once he was born, stayed in the camp and the whole tribe adored the baby (Ahmed, of course). The old Sheik, in fact, fell in love with the woman, but she would not agree to marry him. Sadly she never fully recovered her health and when she was near death she finally told them her story (just like Raoul is finally telling Diana Ahmed’s story):

It turns out that Ahmed’s mother was the only daughter of a noble Spanish family. At seventeen, she was married to Lord Glencaryll, without “any regard to her own wishes” (247). But, like Diana, she grew to love him. However, he had a terrible temper and when he was drunk (which was often) it was even worse. It’s pretty clear that he beat her, as well as emotionally abusing her. Lord Glencaryll took her on a trip to Algiers and wanted to travel into the desert with her:

“He had been drinking heavily, and she did not dare to upset his plans by refusing to go with him or even by telling him how soon her child was going to be born.  So she went with him, and one night something happened – what she would not say […] whatever it was she waited until the camp was asleep and then slipped out into the desert” (248).

I can’t remember who (and thus apologize for the lack of citation), but at least one of the academics writing on The Sheik has pointed to the way this narrative complicates the gender/race politics of the present-day narrative.

The way I see it, while the two stories locate gendered violence as something that men do to women, E. M. Hull by telling them both does not allow us (the reader) to think that this happens only in the ‘uncivilized’ areas of the world.  Ahmed’s mother (who is never given a name in the book) flees from the violence of a British man into the desert, where she is treated well by an Arab man. Diana is abducted from the desert and treated badly by a man who she believes is Arab, but who (heritage-wise) is British/Spanish. But…in both of these stories, the badly treated women love the men who treat them badly. The men who might treat them well (the old Sheik, Raoul Saint Hubert) met them too late.

Well, once Ahmed’s mother died, she left him with the old Sheik who adopted Ahmed, giving him his name and raising him in the desert. When Ahmed was fifteen, he was sent to Paris for an education and met Raoul. He was a “handsome, high-spirited lad” (250) with a quick temper, who didn’t like to obey anyone except the old Sheik. He spent two years in England as well, but Ahmed always wanted to return to the desert and the father he loved.

The old Sheik had never told Ahmed of his parentage or told Lord Glencaryll about his son (according to his mother’s wishes) and once he did, managed to do so in perhaps the worst way possible. Raoul’s father had the task of telling Lord Glencaryll about his son and learned that apparently the tragedy of his wife’s disappearance had cured him of his alcoholism (and his temper). This seems unlikely, but I guess we’ll go with it.

Then, Raoul’s father sent for Ahmed and told him the whole story.  This did not go well: Ahmed lost his temper and cursed out basically everyone possible, up to and including all of England. He refused to see his biological father and returned immediately to the desert, sending all letters his father sent addressed to Viscount Caryll (his courtesy title) back unopened, with ‘Inconnu, Ahmed Ben Hassan’ written on them.

So, that went well. After that, Ahmed was a changed man: “all the loveable qualities that had made him so popular in Paris were gone, and he had become the cruel, merciless man he has been ever since.  The only love left in him was given to his adopted father, whom he worshipped” (256).

And that is the story of Ahmed. Full of questions about the nature of inheritance, the role of nature and culture in forming a person...

Back in the present, Diana’s opinions of Ahmed aren’t really changed by this story. She still loves him and thinks of him as an “Arab of the wilderness”; “the mere accident of his parentage was a factor that weighed nothing” (259).

As you may have already guessed, Ahmed does not die. Slowly he regains consciousness and his strength. When he is getting better, though, he begins to avoid Diana and she is afraid that he is no longer interested in her. One night, Ahmed reveals that he is planning to send Diana away. He thinks she can go back to her old life. She gets angry, thinking he is simply tired of her, but Ahmed reveals that he loves her and it is because of that that he is letting her go. Distraught, Diana tries to kill herself (this book doesn’t go by half measures) and Ahmed stops her and gives in. He will not send her away and they will live together in the desert. The last words of the novel are Diana’s:

“I am not afraid of anything with your arms round me, my desert lover. Ahmed! Monseigneur!” (296).

And that was E. M. Hull’s The Sheik. As a novel, I’m not sure most people today would be 100% enthusiastic about it. But it is very interesting, especially in the context of race and gender in pop culture history. It is also pretty epic. If anyone else has read it, I’d love to hear your opinions! If not, have I inspired you to read it or is my epic summary good enough?

There is also a sequel -- Sons of the Sheik -- about Ahmed and Diana’s two twin sons, one raised in the desert and one raised in England. I don’t own a copy, but if I can find one I might review it too, if requested. It has a dancing girl in it! And whipping!

Next up… another article from 1920s movie magazine and then the first of many sheik romances inspired by The Sheik. Most of them are much much shorter, so I promise the posts won’t be quite so epic… Maybe I’ll start with Desert Barbarian…