Jane Rule 'is one of our finest writers—surely the most significant lesbian writer of the twentieth century.' So wrote author/editor Katherine V. Forrest in her introduction to the 2005 re-issue of Rule's 1977 novel 'The Young in One Another's Arms'.
American-born author Jane Rule died of complications from liver cancer at the home in British Columbia she had shared with her partner of 45 years, Helen Sonthoff. She and Ms. Sonthoff met in the U.S., migrated to Canada and became citizens there in the 1960s. Ms. Sontoff, several years her senior, died at age 83 in 2000.
Jane Rule is the author of seven novels and several collections of short fiction and essays. 'Desert of the Heart' ( 1964 ) , her third novel ( the first published ) is her most recognizable, though not her critically best novel. It was adapted into the iconic lesbian film 'Desert Hearts' by Donna Deitch in 1985, and recently released on DVD. While Rule's literary reputation will rest with her fiction, her pubic life of reluctant activism soared with the publication of 'Lesbian Images' in 1975.
'The silence has finally been broken,' proclaimed Rule as she forced the academic and literary establishments on three continents to reexamine the lives and work of women writers they had decreed worthy of entry into their literary canons. 'Lesbian Images,' pressed their noses into the sexual reality of writers like Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, Elizabeth Bowen, Vita Sackville-West, Colette, Djuna Barnes, and others whose names we accept today, without flinching, as lesbian-identified women. At the nascent Lesbian Writers Conferences in Chicago in the 1970s her book and the reprint of Jeannette Howard Foster's 'Sex Variant Women In Literature' burst like twin bombshells illuminating the history and impact of lesbian writing. Rule was the first to speak about 'coding' in the works of such writers as Cather and Stein. Lesbianism as 'the thing not named' would become a touchstone of later biographers of women writers. Published at the height of the women's liberation movement and on the cusp of women's studies on college campuses, 'Lesbian Images' made Rule a lightening rod for both censors and activists.
Claiming that her mind was a safer place than her body, she eschewed demonstrations and political activism. While asserting she chose 'not to be a crusader for a cause,' because of her outspokenness she was trashed by the establishment for gay content, and by lesbian feminist separatists of the 1970s who wanted her to be more 'politically correct.' Later LGBT generations would support her fiery and open rage against censorship, while denouncing her stand against gay marriage. When her books were confiscated by Customs at the Canadian border, she railed against lesbianism being equated with pornography. She joined Little Sister's Bookstore of Vancouver in a fifteen-year court battle against state censorship. Years before Canada passed the Civil Marriage Act which has U.S. gays scurrying across the border to marry, Rule wrote that allowing the state to regulate adult human relationships was trading our freedom to invent our own lives for state imposed coupledom at the cost of our right to remain private and independent. 'Over the years when we have been left to live lawless, a great many of us have learned to take responsibility for ourselves and each other, for richer or poorer . . .' She went so far as to question the heterosexually married, suggesting we should help free them from 'state defined prisons, not [ be ] volunteering to join them there.' Even after her partner Helen's death she was consistent in refusing to apply for survivor's benefits.
Though her last new novel was published in 1989, she continued to write brief pieces for several venues and a regular column for the 'The Body Politic' into the 1990s. In a contribution to the 'Index on Censorship: International Magazine for Free Expression' she wrote that she chose to place reprint rights to her body of work with small feminist and gay presses in the United States and England because of their commitment 'to keep books in print long enough for them to sell by word of mouth.' Bella Books in the US still distributes eight of her titles and Arsenal Pulp Press in Vancouver has recently re-issued one in its Little Sister's Classics series. A book of her last essays is scheduled for 2008 publication by Hedgerow Press.
As obituaries and tributes pour out across the press and internet we will universally begin to fully appreciate Jane Rule's contributions to literature and our lives. Most of the recent crop of GLBT history and reference books show facets of her, and a Canadian documentary film was made of her life some years ago; we can but await a good full-scale biography. She left some autobiographical material among the forty-or-so boxes in her archives at the University of British Columbia. Uncompromising, independent, erudite, lightening rod and meteor, her influence will endure.
Copyright 2007 by Marie J. Kuda
