Jane Rule writes disciplined, tightly organized, nonautobiographical novels which are concerned much more with character and theme than with plot. Her novels are intellectual, though not very difficult; they are also passionate and tender and...

Jane Rule, who died of cancer on November 27, 2007, at her home in Galiano Island off the coast of British Columbia, will undoubtedly be best remembered for her first published novel, 1964's Desert of the Heart. The book was pioneering not only...

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Like Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium", Jane Rule's The Young In One Another's Arms is concerned with the problem of aging, but whereas the poem proclaimed the possibility of transcending life and all its mortal limitations through the creation of lasting works of art, the novel takes the position that the old have a useful though not necessarily conventional role to perform in a world that is threatened increasingly by modern social, technological and political ills. In this ...

In her reader Lesbian Images, Jane Rule, herself a professed and practising lesbian, attempts to debunk the time-honoured theories that homosexuality is a sin and/or a sickness. For the most part she is successful, amassing a great deal of evidence to shore up her arguments about what lesbianism isn't. Unhappily she doesn't enlighten us much about what it is, claiming magisterially, "the reality of lesbian experience transcends all theories about it." (p. 87) Rule argues that psy...

[Jane Rule's] Outlander is a collection of stories and essays about the lives of lesbians…. Outlander reflects the courage it takes to speak out of imposed silences—and in doing so, makes room for the stories that have not yet been told.