When Jane Rule’s first novel, Desert of the Heart, was published in 1964, it was an auspicious beginning for a writer who would build a reputation on her unflinching views about sexuality, relationships and the painful constrictions of societal convention. Even more astonishing is the way in which the novel has retained its cool quiet beauty and power of expression decades later.

Evelyn Hall is a literature professor who travels to Reno, Nevada in the summer of 1958 in order to obtain a divorce and thus put an end to her disastrous sixteen-year marriage. She is divorcing her husband on the advice of his psychiatrist because, this being the ’50s, he believes that Evelyn’s success is causing her husband’s depression. During her six-week stay at a boarding house (a residency requirement) Evelyn meets Ann Childs.

At once, the narrative enters an aesthetic space that calls to mind the mythical preoccupations of Thomas Mann, the philosophical speculations of Frederich Nietzsche, the artistic theories of Camille Paglia, and the wry ironic humour of Iris Murdoch. They rapidly become aware of an increasing tension, arising in part from the generational gap between Evelyn and this young woman who bears a striking physical resemblance to her.

As for Ann, she is most alluring in her representation of freedom to Evelyn, from her innate artistic prowess to her unconventional liaisons amid the smoky nocturnal backdrop of casino life. And once these women have found the promise of a significant relationship, Rule’s rather open-ended question is whether or not it can survive the toxic atmosphere, not simply of an unruly gambling town, but of the past sorrows and hardships each of the characters is attempting to put behind them.

The title derives from W.H. Auden’s elegy for Yeats—“In the desert of the heart / Let the healing fountain start.”

With an afterword by Linda M. Morra

Discovered in her papers in 2008, Jane Rule’s autobiography is a rich and culturally significant document that follows the first twenty-one years of her life: the complexities of her relationships with family, friends, and early lovers, and how her sensibilities were fashioned by mentors or impeded by the socio-cultural practices and educational ­politics of the day.

In writing about her ­formative years, Rule is indeed “taking” the measure of her life, assessing its contours of pleasure and pain, accounting for how it evolved as it did. Yet not ­allowing the manuscript to be published in her lifetime was an act of ­discretion: she was considering those who might have been affected by being represented in her work not as confidently ­emancipated as she had always been. She must also have appreciated the ambiguity of the title she chose, with all its implications of suicide: at the end of her writing life, she was submitting herself to critical scrutiny, ­allowing herself to be vulnerable as a person to the critique of her readers.

Deeply moving and elegantly witty, Taking My Life probes the larger philosophical questions that were to preoccupy Rule throughout her literary career and showcases the origins and contexts that gave shape to her rich intellectual life. It will especially ­appeal to avid followers of her work, delighted to discover another of her books that has, until now, remained unpublished.

When Jane Rule’s first novel, Desert of the Heart, was published in 1964, it was an auspicious beginning for a writer who would build a reputation on her unflinching views about sexuality, relationships and the painful constrictions of societal convention. Even more astonishing is the way in which the novel has retained its cool quiet beauty and power of expression decades later.

Evelyn Hall is a literature professor who travels to Reno, Nevada in the summer of 1958 in order to obtain a divorce and thus put an end to her disastrous sixteen-year marriage. She is divorcing her husband on the advice of his psychiatrist because, this being the ’50s, he believes that Evelyn’s success is causing her husband’s depression. During her six-week stay at a boarding house (a residency requirement) Evelyn meets Ann Childs.

At once, the narrative enters an aesthetic space that calls to mind the mythical preoccupations of Thomas Mann, the philosophical speculations of Frederich Nietzsche, the artistic theories of Camille Paglia, and the wry ironic humour of Iris Murdoch. They rapidly become aware of an increasing tension, arising in part from the generational gap between Evelyn and this young woman who bears a striking physical resemblance to her.

As for Ann, she is most alluring in her representation of freedom to Evelyn, from her innate artistic prowess to her unconventional liaisons amid the smoky nocturnal backdrop of casino life. And once these women have found the promise of a significant relationship, Rule’s rather open-ended question is whether or not it can survive the toxic atmosphere, not simply of an unruly gambling town, but of the past sorrows and hardships each of the characters is attempting to put behind them.

The title derives from W.H. Auden’s elegy for Yeats—“In the desert of the heart / Let the healing fountain start.”

With an afterword by Linda M. Morra

Discovered in her papers in 2008, Jane Rule’s autobiography is a rich and culturally significant document that follows the first twenty-one years of her life: the complexities of her relationships with family, friends, and early lovers, and how her sensibilities were fashioned by mentors or impeded by the socio-cultural practices and educational ­politics of the day.

In writing about her ­formative years, Rule is indeed “taking” the measure of her life, assessing its contours of pleasure and pain, accounting for how it evolved as it did. Yet not ­allowing the manuscript to be published in her lifetime was an act of ­discretion: she was considering those who might have been affected by being represented in her work not as confidently ­emancipated as she had always been. She must also have appreciated the ambiguity of the title she chose, with all its implications of suicide: at the end of her writing life, she was submitting herself to critical scrutiny, ­allowing herself to be vulnerable as a person to the critique of her readers.

Deeply moving and elegantly witty, Taking My Life probes the larger philosophical questions that were to preoccupy Rule throughout her literary career and showcases the origins and contexts that gave shape to her rich intellectual life. It will especially ­appeal to avid followers of her work, delighted to discover another of her books that has, until now, remained unpublished.