Jane (Vance) Rule | Biography

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 optimistic. Rule's characters are typically people who have left behind certain conventions of social grouping and behavior or who are tempted to do so. The challenge they face is one of "voluntary human relationships," in which they must invent new and variable guidelines for communal life. The author's respect and sympathy for her characters, in particular for their growth and freedom, are strongly felt throughout. Herself a lesbian. Rule always includes at least one lesbian relationship in each of her novels. A particularly attractive feature of Rule's fiction is that such relationships never overshadow her portrayals of characters who do not submit to definition by a single factor such as sexual orientation. Rule's style is clear and unmannered, but rather complex. Dialogue accounts for much of her novels, and she is particularly interested in tonalities or the interplay of voices; the analogy Rule uses to describe this interest is that of chamber music.

Jane Rule was born on 28 March 1931, in Plainfield, New Jersey. She was a middle child, whose parents, Arthur Rule, a businessman, and Jane Packer Rule, moved the family around a good deal in the United States. She received a B.A. in English from Mills College in California (1952) and was an occasional student at University College, London, England, and at Stanford University. After two years teaching English at Concord Academy in Concord, Massachusetts, she moved to Canada in 1956 and later became a Canadian citizen. For twenty years she worked intermittently as a teacher in the English and creative writing departments at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She now lives on Galiano Island.

Her first book, The Desert of the Heart (1964), focuses on the hesitations and flowering of a love affair between two women--a professor of English who has come to Reno for a divorce and a young cartoonist who works in a casino. Their commitment is explored in the context of attitudes (such as the necessity of marriage and child-bearing) which linger when they have become irrelevant and attitudes (including attachments to place, or people, or work) which must always be taken into account. Mirror and desert images are employed in aid of complex, carefully modulated themes.

This Is Not For You (1970), Rule's second novel, takes the form of an unmailed letter to Esther from Kate. Self-protective, determined at all costs to be conventionally right, Kate refuses to transmit what she perceives as the stain of her lesbianism to the relationship with Esther. This is an intense, earnest book; behind Kate's oppressive, wrong-headed integrity, one senses the author's own liberating anger. The cardinal error in Rule's world is a refusal to risk making mistakes.

Against the Season (1971) marks a turning point in Rule's career. She abandons here the focus upon a single character or a single relationship; point of view becomes more flexible, and the canvas grows. This is a gently iconoclastic novel about community and about unconventional categories of attachment, particularly when these defy one's expectations about what behavior is appropriate to the various seasons of human life.

In 1975 Rule produced a collection of thirteen stories entitled Theme for Diverse Instruments. The author's short fiction--witness, for instance, the title story and "Invention for Shelagh"--tends to be more experimental than her novels, although many of these stories (culled from two decades of work) are traditional in form. In Theme for Diverse Instruments generally, more attention is paid to a dialectic between freedom and involuntary relationships--with one's family most often or with one's country. The house is a recurrent image, most often signifying constriction or imposed ideas. The titles of some of the most interesting stories reflect this preoccupation: "My Father's House," "House," "Housekeeper," and "In the Basement of the House."

Lesbian Images (1975), a volume of criticism, is a lucid, scholarly examination of the ways in which lesbian experience has been reflected in the life and work of selected lesbian writers. It begins with a personal introduction, in which Rule gives an account of her own sense of herself as lesbian, the difficulties she has faced, and the critical response to lesbian material in her novels. The next two chapters trace religious and psychoanalytical attitudes to lesbianism. Then twelve individual chapters are devoted to the works of writers such as Radcliffe Hall, Gertrude Stein, Willa Cather, Vita Sackville-West, Colette, and May Sarton. The book concludes with omnibus chapters entitled "Four Decades of Fiction" and "Recent Nonfiction."

Rule's 1977 novel, The Young in One Another's Arms, continues in the direction pointed by Against the Season, but the community won in this novel is considerably more precarious, as the title suggests, in its allusion to the "dying generations" of William Butler Yeats. As in the earlier novel, people of widely varying ages combine to support and enjoy one another. But political threats (of the Vietnam war, of law, and the engines of progress), as well as abiding natural dangers (the loss of life, of limb) are more prominent here. As in The Desert of the Heart, Rule employs a boarding-house as a microcosm of society. Originally located in Vancouver, the group becomes more self-conscious, more aware of its vulnerability and its potential for love, when it reassembles on one of the Gulf islands.

Contract with the World (1980) is an ambitious novel. It concerns again a group of friends and lovers, mostly artists of some kind, and mostly in late youth--at a time when they must make a contract with the world or opt out. Their love relationships and the direction of their creative work are the central issues. The novel is divided into six sections, each assigned to a principal character who becomes the center of interest for that section and then fades back into the supporting cast.

Outlander: Stories and Essays (1981) contains thirteen short stories which are often more interesting as contexts for the discussion of lesbian themes than as fiction and twelve essays concerned with lesbian issues. In this book Rule seems to be addressing other lesbians most particularly.

Inland Passage and Other Stories (1985) is Rule's most recent collection of short stories. Many of the works focus on the simple pleasures of home life. Harry and Anna, parents of two small children, are two of the author's most appealing protagonists; in several of the stories collected here they suffer the vicissitudes of raising children in a material world, doing what they can to introduce genuine human compassion into their lives. Other stories treat a wide variety of lesbian themes in a compassionate and open-minded way.

Rule's collection of essays, A Hot-Eyed Moderate (1985), consists of forty-seven short essays--three pages each on the average--grouped under four headings: "On Writing," "Writing for the Gay Press," "Profiles and Recollections," and "Reflections." Many of these essays appeared first in the magazine the Body Politic; others appeared in Canadian Literature, Branching Out, and Room of One's Own, and still others are published here for the first time. In the section "On Writing," in an essay entitled "Before and After Sexual Politics," Rule argues that literature must be read "seriously and personally," and she warns against the specious objectivity of a formalist approach: "A work of art is not a clever puzzle to be solved by clever readers; it is a passionately articulated vision to be intensely shared." Particularly distinguished among the "Profiles" are her essays about two painters, Judith Lodge and Takao Tanabe. In the essay "You Cannot Judge a Pumpkin's Happiness by the Smile Upon Its Face," in "Reflections," Rule describes the glow-in-the-dark skeleton costumes that her father made for her and her brother on Halloween. The darkness and the light as Rule remembers them, together with the fact that the skeletons were anatomically correct, suggest something of Rule's own clear-sighted approach to life.

Jane Rule's fiction offers a "passionately articulated vision." For all its cool intelligence, her work invites a warm, personal response. Both her essays and her fiction have a particular fascination for women. The voice that speaks in Rule's work is characterized, above all, by honesty and tolerance; and the attractiveness of her work is very much a function of that voice.