Ellen Turner

E.M. Hull and the Valentino cult: gender reversal after The sheik

In 1919 the now largely forgotten popular novelist E.M. Hull sparked a decade of infatuation with the ‘desert romance’ on the publication of her first book, The sheik. The obsession with the genre, fuelled by the release of Melfords 1921 film adaptation of the book, saw women swooning in the aisles at ‘screen god’ Rudolph Valentinos starring role. My aim here is to broaden the focus on Hull away from the much maligned novel, The sheik, by suggesting that Hulls subsequent novels, though never straying very far from the lucrative formula she cultivated with her first novel, were, in part at least, written in reaction to the uproar caused by this novel. I argue that Hulls representation of androgynous and cross-dressing women allows for her heroines to inhabit positions of relative power in relation to their male counterparts.

Margarine, Mystery and Modernity : Margarine and Class in Literary Texts (1880-1945)

ABSTRACT Margarine represents the pinnacle of culinary modernity, but it also has deep-seated working-class undertones connected to its origin as a butter substitute to feed the masses. This paper employs close readings as a tool to explore references to margarine in literary texts, and to situate them within a broader cultural context. In the first section of the analysis margarine references are surveyed in order to demonstrate how the product contains a multitude of sometimes conflicting meanings. In the second part of the analysis two works of detective fiction are explored—Arthur Morrison’s “The Stolen Blenkinsop” (1908) and Dorothy L. Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise (1933)—which use margarine as a central plot device. It is argued that margarine is the foodstuff of modernity since it contains within it the conflicting impulses which characterize the modernist mentality. Margarine stands for the novel and the innovative. It stands for technology and progress. However, margarine also embodies certain modernist anxieties about the prevalence of mass culture and fear surrounding the dissolution of boundaries between the high and the low, the real and the fake. The harder it is to tell the difference between butter and its cheaper alternative, the greater the threat.

E. M. Hull's Camping in the Sahara: desert romance meets desert reality

The publication of Camping in the Sahara, seven years after its author E. M. Hull was reluctantly catapulted to fame on the back of her ignominious debut novel, The Sheik (1919), made relatively little impact on her already cemented reputation as a bestselling author of desert “trash”. Nevertheless, her travelogue served to clarify her relative authority on the North African Saharan regions in which her novels were set. Hulls fictional output, abetted by Rudolph Valentinos screen performance in the novels film adaptation, directed by George Melford (1921), served as a stimulus to the “sheik obsession” which was to capture the imagination of a generation during the 1920s. Even though Hulls name is forever wed to The Sheik, the woman herself remains something of an enigma. There is little critical or biographical information on Hull and her travels in Algeria. This article aims to piece together the available evidence. It also aims to begin to unravel the connection between Hulls fictional and non-fictional writing and to comment on its impact on the desert romance craze of the 1920s. Having examined how travel trends to the Sahara in the 1920s were informed by movements in popular culture, the essay proceeds to explore how Hull constructs the desert as a backdrop to her own story into which she writes herself. Hulls desert in Camping in the Sahara resembles a film set in which the scenery is imagined through a camera lens and the people she encounters are inadvertently assessed through the eyes of a casting director.