"The Sheikh"

Is a 1919 novel by Edith Maude Hull, commonly described, at the time my grandmother bought the hardbound copy that I, as a ten-year-old-boy, read thirty-three years later, as "shocking" and "poisonously salacious."  I thought so too. That is why I read it.  My mother, passing through the room where I was reading it, stopped and said, "Well, that is probably the most passionate book ever written."  Her italics.  

In recent decades, the novel has been strongly criticized for its central plot element: the idea that rape leads to love.  But no, seriously, if you've been reading attentively, the plot is, rather: Rape--when your rapist is muscular and beautiful, and has cruel eyes, and says he doesn't care what you want, and smokes these intoxicatingly aromatic Turkish cigarets, so that the smell of him lingers even when he's not there--is love.  Or as good as.  Or even a helluva lot better than.