The Desert Healer (1923) is a romance novel by English author E.M. Hull. Hull’s novel The Sheikh (1919) sold millions of copies following the release of a 1921 film of the same name. Part of a tradition of Orientalist fiction, The Desert Healer, alongside The Sheik and its sequel, The Sons of the Sheik (1925), have proven both controversial and popular, and now serve as a reminder of the ways in which British subjects imagined themselves in relation to the colonial world.
Abandoned by his wife, heartbroken at the loss of his child, Carew has taken to the desert to work as a mercenary, healer, and mediator between local authority figures. Content to live as a shadow of his former self, Carew forsakes Western civilization for the limitlessness and anonymity of the Algerian desert. Journeying on horseback one day, he hears the screams of a woman in the midst of being kidnapped, and reluctantly saves her life. Disheveled and barely conscious, Marny Gerardine, an Englishwoman, asks for her savior’s name. Pretending to be an Arab, Carew maintains his disguise and, after a night spent resting in his shelter, brings the woman home to Algiers. There, she fears the return of her abusive husband Clyde, who will find a way―as always―to blame her for the attack. Recalling the kindness of her gentle rescuer, she wonders if he is thinking of her, if they will see one another once more. The Desert Healer is romance novel by a master of English popular fiction.
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E.M. Hull (1880-1947) was an English romance novelist. Born in London, Hull was the daughter of a Canadian mother and a father from New York City. As a girl, Hull visited Algeria with her family, providing the setting for many of her successful novels, including The Sheikh (1919), an international bestseller. Notoriously reclusive, Hull settled in Derbyshire with her husband, a civil engineer and pig farmer, with whom she had a daughter, Cecil Winstanley Hull. The Sheikh served as source material for a popular 1921 silent film of the same name by Paramount, leading to the sale of millions of copies of Hull’s novel.
