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 difficul...
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Critical Essay by Christopher Salvesen
Reno, Nevada is the setting for a first novel which is a convincing example of its kind: The Desert of the Heart develops a moral situation until a decision is ...
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Critical Essay by John Glassco
Jane Rule's fifth novel [The Young in One Another's Arms] will probably be the first to find a wide audience, since it comes after the success of a timely...
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Critical Essay by Sandra Martin
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...
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Critical Essay by Edith Milton
[The Young in One Another's Arms] is a rather dreadful piece of writing, about a one-armed woman about to be evicted from the Vancouver boarding house which she ...
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Critical Essay by Anthony Brennan
The structure of [The Young in One Another's Arms] is untidy because it tracks erratically in pursuit of the disorganized lives of a large number of character...
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Critical Essay by Carrie Macmillan
Like Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium", Jane Rule's The Young In One Another's Arms is concerned with the problem of aging, but where...
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Critical Essay by Publishers Weekly
["Contract with the World"] is a very fine novel, the third by the author of "The Desert of the Heart." It is an ambitious work focusin...
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Critical Essay by Barbara Amiel
Contemporary life is the subject matter … of Contract With the World, Jane Rule's new novel and her best writing to date. These characters, unlike the ra...
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Critical Essay by Catherine Ross
Contract with the World, Jane Rule's fifth novel, begins where the education novel usually leaves off, with its characters newly launched into their various ca...
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Critical Essay by Janet Aalfs
[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 impo...
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Critical Essay by The Times Literary Supplement
Miss Rule shows talent in setting [the scene of The Desert of the Heart], with its neon nights and torpid days in the huge desert, but becomes painfull...
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Critical Essay by Anne Constance Penta
[The Desert of the Heart, a] startlingly explicit novel of lesbian love, is neither an apology nor an indictment. It is an objective portrayal of love between t...
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Critical Essay by Jody Haberland
[This Is Not for You, a] sensitive yet almost documentary account of the college and early adult life of a woman, is unsettling because of its precarious balance betw...
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Critical Essay by Bruce D. Allen
Amelia Larson is a crippled spinster dominated by the memory of her dead sister, whose painful diaries she is reading. She is uncertainly poised between past and pres...
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Critical Essay by Michele M. Leber
If lesbianism were accepted as just another way of loving—and if lesbian writers were not always taken in a sexual context—[Lesbian Images] would not ...
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Critical Essay by Robin Skelton
[Lesbian Images] is a sensible, witty, well-written book which provides us with new perspectives upon the lives and works of a number of women writers…. The bio...
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Critical Essay by Victoria Glendinning
[Lesbian Images] begins with a brief history of Miss Rule's discovery of her own lesbianism, which is extremely interesting; she is generous, honest, and...
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Critical Essay by Bertha Harris
[Lesbian Images] intends to show what it means to be a lesbian who characterizes her reality in art; who shows "truth in the rich particular rather than in the ...
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