Jane Rule
Desert of the Heart
(Bella Books)
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Synopsis
Evelyn Hall arrives in Reno wanting only to be left alone while she waits
six weeks for a painful divorce from her husband. Once there she meets
Ann Child - 15 years her junior, who is both a free spirit and a lesbian.
Soon Ann refuses to let the controlled but vulnerable Evelyn ignore the
powerful emotions that begin to unleash inside her...
Immortalized for a whole new generation by the film Desert Hearts, Jane
Rule's classic DESERT OF THE HEART is arguably her finest novel. Joyce
Carol Oates called it "an intelligent and utterly believable novel".
Told with all the wit and skill of this fine novelist, the book stands
as a classic of lesbian literature.
Biography
Born
in New Jersey on March 28, 1931, Jane Rule was raised in the American
Midwest and California. In 1952 she graduated from Mills College and moved
to Canada four years later, settling in British Columbia. Rule taught
intermittently at the University of British Columbia until 1976 when she
moved to Galiano Island.
Jane Rule is celebrated internationally for her fiction and her non-fiction.
Her career began in 1964 with the publication of her novel Desert of the
Heart.
In all Jane Rule has authored twelve books all showing her to be a keen
observer of social and emotional relationships, and she writes with warmth
and candor.
Contributors Testimonials
I started reading Desert of the Heart on a train journey home to Manchester, when I was a student in the early 1980’s. I finished the book in the early hours of the morning. Jane Rule wrote Desert of the Heart in 1964, more than twenty-years before I read it, and before the gay liberation movement truly gathered momentum. She was also one of the first out-writers to write about being a lesbian in fiction. Like the many thousands of young lesbian women who read it before me, and since, the intelligent, witty, beautiful, complex and very real central characters of Evelyn and Ann filled me with a huge sense of possibility and excitement. There are many of us out there who have a lot in our lives to thank Jane Rule for.