After my daughter was born, I could always tell which of my fellow Mormons had read “The Work and the Glory” novels by the way they a) immediately associated the first name Jerusha with Hyrum Smith’s first wife and b) assumed (wrongly, as it happened) that reading that nine-book series was how I fell in love with the name.
“The Work and the Glory” made for terrible history: sanitizing, hagiographic, undocumented. It wasn’t especially strong fiction either, for that matter. But it filled a need, which explains why it was so popular among Mormons 20 years ago, with women in the faith’s Relief Society trading the large hardback volumes back and forth to one another after church.