Jane Rule, Pioneer of Lesbian Fiction, Dies at 76
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Following Desert of the Heart, Rule wrote a handful of novels, several collections of short stories and essays, and hundreds of uncollected articles and commentaries. Lesbian Images (1975) was one of the first collections of serious, somewhat didactic, yet entirely readable essays about lesbian writers, including major names like Gertrude Stein, Colette, and Willa Cather, and also names less frequently seen, such as The Little Review editor Margaret Anderson and mid-century novelists Dorothy Baker and Elizabeth Bowen. While some essays in A Hot-Eyed Moderate (1985), written quickly for a variety of Canadian, feminist, and gay periodicals, do not stand up well today, her honesty is admirable: “I have published everywhere I could.”

Jane Rule was was born in New Jersey in 1931. She read The Well of Loneliness when she was 15 and was deeply affected by it, identifying with Stephen Gordon, the novel’s main lesbian character. After graduating from college, she followed a female lover to England, where she studied literature. As reported in an extensive obituary in Toronto’s Globe and Mail on-line, in England she became close friends with British literary critic and academician John Hulcoop. A few years later, she met Helen Sonthoff, fourteen years her senior, a fellow teacher at Concord Academy in Concord, Massachusetts. (This was the school where, 34 years later, Kevin Jennings would found GSLEN). Rule moved to Vancouver for a variety of reasons: American politics, desire to be with her friend Hulcoop, who had emigrated to British Columbia, and her lesbianism, among others. She shared accommodations with Hulcoop at the home, said the Globe and Mail, of a longshoreman. An interesting quartet developed among Hulcoop, his fiancée, Rule, and Helen Sonthoff, who was at that time married but soon to divorce amicably. Sonthoff, through her former husband, was a good friend of W. H. Auden.

Although Rule and Sonthoff were by all measures entirely devoted to each other for over 45 years, they had an open relationship. Rule wrote fiercely political articles for Canadian gay media in favor of gay rights and worked tirelessly against government censorship, but she was adamantly opposed to same-sex marriage. In a frequently quoted essay in BC Bookworld (Spring 2001), she said: “To be forced back into the heterosexual cage of coupledom is not a step forward but a step back into state-imposed definitons of relationship.”

Jane Rule’s character-driven novels are all eminently readable, but it is a matter of critical opinion as to whether her “middle of the road” writings are meant to be subversive or accessible. She always wanted to tell the truth, she said, and included heterosexual characters in her novels because she wanted to reflect the real world. She eschewed political correctness, did not agree with lesbian-feminist separatism, and was often chided by a variety of critics from the gay and lesbian media. She was for a long time the Canadian media’s go-to person for all things GLBT. As reported in her obituary in The London Times on-line, “her novels remain an incisive, quietly outlandish view of postwar Canada.”

By 1991, Rule said that she no longer felt “driven” to write, due in part to her many medical problems and the medications that she was taking. While she had received many writing awards, the most notable was the Order of Canada, which was bestowed almost fifty years after she became a Canadian citizen. When diagnosed with cancer last year, she declined treatment and died at home on her beloved island.