Steve Rogers

I have just started reading a history of gay Americans in WWII. I am only up to early 1941 and the army has already had to invent the convoluted concept of a ‘reverse malingerer’, ie. a person who should be exempt from conscription but whose patriotism compelled them to sneak into the armed services. Steve Rogers, with his repeated attempts to enlist, was a reverse malingerer.

Two reviews!

Helen Hunt Jackson’s *Hetty’s Strange History* (1877) is a mixed bag indeed. She isn’t what I’d call a super story teller, relying heavily on telling rather than showing. And the plot is decidedly odd – married woman Hetty feigns her death and leaves her husband because she thinks he would be happier with someone else. But he isn’t, and when he finds her (a decade later) they remarry. A sub-plot involves condemning the New England small mindedness in which a woman who had pre-marital sex (and then married the same man) was shunned.


Elizabeth Phelps Ward was most famous for her psychic series. *The Gates Ajar* was written just after the war (when there was a great interest in spiritualism). *The Gates Between* was written in the 1880s, and also deals with communications from the other side. In this case, the man communicating is an entirely unsympathetic doctor who spends his time boasting about his rationality and denigrating women. He marries, quarrels with his wife, and dies in a runaway horse crash, and then ascends to another realm where he realises that spiritual gifts are more important than intellectual ones.


This was not a pleasant read, because the narrator was so unmitigatedly misogynistic and narcissistic. OTOH, he was a well developed character and the chapter with the quarrel was the most plausible and interesting to me. The thousand petty factors that made him ill tempered are neatly presented. As for the rest…. Well, Phelps Ward is now chiefly remembered through the traditional ‘Gates Ajar’ floral arrangement for flowers, and there is a reason this is so.