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A portrait of Edith Hull in later years

                                                 - HAZELWOOD TO HOLLYWOOD -

PETER SEDDON CONSIDERS THE REMARKABLE LIFE OF HAZELWOOD NOVELIST EDITH MAUDE HULL

In a quiet corner of Hazelwood churchyard stands the cruciform gravestone of Edith Maude Hull, for many years a resident of that peaceful Derbyshire village, who died there on 11 February 1947, aged 66. Nothing about the memorial suggests that her ‘forgotten’ life was in any way remarkable, nor that such a respectable lady – generally described as ‘bespectacled and elderly’ by the dwindling few who remember her - could possibly link the tranquil rusticity of Hazelwood, Derbyshire, with the strident glamour of Hollywood, California.

Yet E. M. Hull, as she came to be known, forged precisely that connection through her special talent as a leading writer of the ‘Roaring Twenties’. When her debut novel The Sheik was published in 1919, Hull’s mastery of language mingled fact and fantasy to such potent effect that even hedonistic Hollywood film makers were shocked, shaken and not a little stirred by the book’s brazen ‘physicality’.

The movie moguls swiftly turned the Hazelwood writer’s searing desert romance into a blockbusting silent film. It not only made a huge star of its lead actor Rudolf Valentino, but also turned a somewhat unwelcome spotlight onto the modest author whose own quiet demeanour betrayed no hint of the shamelessly risqué prose which flowed so convincingly from her pen.

Edith Hull’s unusual life began in the Borough of Hampstead, London, where she was born Edith Maude Henderson at 28, Marlborough Hill, on 16 August 1880. She was the only daughter of the shipowner James Henderson, a man of New York ancestry born at sea in the Pacific, and his Canadian wife Katie. It followed that Edith became no stranger to travel, and among the countries she visited in childhood was Algeria, the setting for her most celebrated novel.

There is no evidence that Edith demonstrated any special aptitude for literature at school, and her early life followed a pattern typical of her comfortable upbringing. In her teens she met Percy Winstanley Hull, eleven years her senior and born of good Derbyshire stock in Hazelwood, but then employed in London as a civil engineer. The couple were married in summer 1899, living initially at Stanwell House in Stanwell, Surrey, before moving up country to Hazelwood in the first decade of the last century.

They moved into Percy Hull’s childhood home ‘The Knowle’, an imposing residence with fine grounds laid out by former Chatsworth gardener Joseph Mooney, who had worked under Sir Joseph Paxton. The entire surrounds were the quintessence of an English rural idyll, but perhaps it was all rather dull for a young wife so accustomed to overseas travel, especially after the birth of the couple’s only daughter Cecil Winstanley Hull – whilst a happy event, it saw Edith lapse into a round of domesticity which was as genteel as it was inevitable.

Yet out of boredom grew desire. During her husband’s absence in the First World War, Edith Hull’s imagination began first to flourish and then to bear fruit. She commenced writing a novel, by her own admission ‘not with any idea of it being published, but rather as a means of distraction at a time when I felt very much alone.’ Once the book was finished, however, a touch of vanity spurred the budding novelist to try her luck, and in 1919 an English publisher put The Sheik into print.

Packed with romance, adventure, unbridled passion and even overt sexuality - then a startling innovation - it was in many ways astonishing that such a book should emanate from the cloistered rooms of a Derbyshire country house, but therein lies the talent of a natural writer, which E. M. Hull most assuredly was. The book was widely dismissed by critics, even violently condemned by some as ‘lascivious pornography’, but was consumed by a hungry public in both Britain and America with the same reckless excitability which characterised the book’s spoilt aristocratic heroine Diana Mayo.

Most of the readers were women, the breathtakingly daring plot appealing to their smouldering sensibilities at a time when ‘emancipation’ was the word on all feminine lips. Few books of the twentieth century created such a stir in literary and media circles, and not until the British publication of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960 (and again there were Derbyshire links!) was any novel considered so pivotal in extending the boundaries of permissiveness.

Edith Hull was genuinely taken aback by her work’s success. It became a best-seller of the 1920s and is still in print today having sold 1.2 million copies worldwide. Naturally her private life attracted publicity, the line favoured by the press being that she was ‘the shy wife of a Derbyshire pig farmer’ – a fair summation, for Percy Hull did become an agriculturalist noted for breeding prize-winning pigs, and Edith was, at least outwardly, a retiring personality.

Yet any hopes she may have harboured that the furore surrounding the book would subside, were hopelessly dashed by the massive success of the subsequent Hollywood film, which premiered in America in 1921. The story of a wilful English girl who goes travelling alone and is kidnapped by a mysterious Arab sheik, was as irresistible to the movie moguls as the daring damsel was to the ‘desert rat’ himself. Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan persistently ravishes his captive until she finally surrenders willingly to his exotic charms, before it is revealed in the final reel that he is really the long-lost son of an English aristocrat, to whom any woman could justifiably succumb without a morsel of shame!

By the end of its worldwide run the iconic film had been seen by a staggering 125 million people, and it established Rudolf Valentino as ‘The Great Lover’ of the silent screen, a role with which he remains associated to this day. Valentino tragically died aged only 31 in 1926, but his powerful performance had a lasting effect. It popularised the genre of the ‘desert romance’, launched a golden age of cinematic glamour, and liberalised standards of propriety.

Edith Hull gained financially from her success, but sought no capital from the attendant publicity. When The Sheik was first shown in Derby in 1923 she was not there to see it, having gone travelling with her daughter in North Africa, a trip which itself led to another book, Camping in the Sahara (1926), this one a strictly factual account. But fiction was Hull’s undoubted forté, and from 1919 to 1939 she wrote seven novels, including The Shadow of the East (1921), The Sons of the Sheik (1925) - again adapted as a Valentino film - The Lion Tamer (1928) and The Forest of Terrible Things (1939).

Faced thereafter with another war and by now the sadness of widowhood, Edith Hull moved to ‘Holmeside’ in Hazelwood, where she died on Tuesday 11 February, 1947, after a short illness. Although the passage of time saw her name recede from popular consciousness, E. M. Hull remains an important figure in the development of literary style.

There can be no more fitting epitaph than an extract from The Sheik: ‘The flaming light of desire burning in his eyes turned her sick and faint. Her body throbbed with the consciousness of a knowledge that appalled her, and each separate nerve in her system shrank against the understanding that had come to her under the consuming fire of his ardent gaze, and in the fierce embrace that was drawing her shaking limbs closer and closer to the man’s own pulsating body - “Oh you brute! You brute!” she wailed, until his kisses silenced her.’

Countless literary academics and fiery feminists have drawn many different and often controversial conclusions from their exhaustive studies of Edith Hull’s potent prose, but only one observation is beyond dispute – never underestimate ‘the shy wife of a Derbyshire pig farmer’!

• Hull, Edith Maude - R.I.P. in Hazelwood
• James Bond Meets Sherlock Holmes - Derbyshire's Literary Heritage

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