sentences:  With its plot centered on the subjugation of a willful woman, "The Sheik" has been compared to "The Taming of the Shrew" by William Shakespeare.Criticism of the novel has been tempered, however, by other writers observing that women writers of Hull's period used the already well-established genre of the Orientalist fantasy to begin putting feminist ideas before their primarily female readership.Women appear as protagonists in desert romances, for example, and in "The Sheik" specifically, the reader is engaged with Diana as an independent-minded and defiant woman for most of the novel's length, before Hull concludes her story in a conventional way.