Canadian novelist
Jane Rule, author of Desert of the Heart,
This Is Not for You, Against the Season,
and The Young in One Another's Arms, died of
complications of liver cancer in her Galiano Island
home in British Columbia. She was 76.
Canadian novelist
Jane Rule, author of Desert of the Heart,
This Is Not for You, Against the Season,
and The Young in One Another's Arms, died of
complications of liver cancer in her Galiano Island
home in British Columbia, according to The
Toronto Star. She was 76. Rule's first novel,
Desert of the Heart, was published in 1964 and
made into the film Desert Hearts in 1986.
Rule was born in
Plainfield, N.J., in 1931 and graduated in English
literature from California's Mills College in 1952. While
teaching English and biology at Concord Academy, a
private girls' school in Massachusetts, she met Helen
Sonthoff, a creative writing and literature teacher.
After Rule immigrated to Vancouver, Canada, in 1956,
Sonthoff joined her, and the two lived together until
Sonthoff's death in 2000.
"She was the
first Canadian woman writer to write about being gay as
if it was part of the normal life," Toronto novelist Susan
Swan told the Star from her Toronto home.
"There was no self-consciousness about it. There
didn't seem to be any need for her to wave a political
flag. This female character as a lesbian -- you picked
that up by reading the story. You weren't reading the story
to find out what it was like to be a lesbian." (The
Advocate)
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