Rogue Male
by Geoffrey Household Published: 1939 While reading another novel, I became curious about a reference to a book that one of the characters was reading. Looking it up, I found it was a real novel, and that it had been written in 1939. I ordered it. In all of my reading I'd never encountered the book, nor heard of the author. It's a novel that, at least upon first reading, I'd suggest become part of a school's curriculum. Upon deeper research, it would seem that Geoffrey Household, the writer, routinely explores certain characters and basic plot lines in his fiction, typically of a singular male figure, at least at some level an analogue of the "English gentleman," or "gentle Englishman," who must survive an ultimate test, or duel. The character, the English gentleman, is the "embodiment of that myth of foreigners...I will not kill; to hide I am ashamed. So I endure without object." The rogue male, then, is the gentle decent chap who takes o...
