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Summary
Summary
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appeal to avid followers of her work, delighted to discover another of her books that has, until now, remained unpublished.
Author Notes
Jane Rule was born in New Jersey in 1931 and came to Canada in 1956, where she later taught at the University of British Columbia. Her first novel, Desert of the Heart (1964), in which two women fall in love in 1950s Reno, Nevada, was successful as a 1985 feature film titled Desert Hearts.
Rule emerged as one of the most respected writers in Canada with her many novels, essays and collections of short stories, including Theme for Diverse Instruments (1975). She received the Canadian Authors Association best novel and best short story awards, the American Gay Academic Literature Award, the U.S. Fund for Human Dignity Award of Merit, the Canadian National Institute for the Blind's Talking Book of the Year Award and an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of British Columbia.
In 1996, Jane Rule received the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award for an Outstanding Literary Career in British Columbia. She passed away in 2007.
Reviews (1)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This charming, thoughtful memoir recounts the first 21 years of the life of Rule, a writer who wrote fiction and nonfiction on lesbian themes and who died in 2007. Rule was born in New Jersey in 1931 and lived in various states, including Texas and California. In 1956, she moved to Canada, where she became a professor at the University of British Columbia and a celebrated writer of novels (she is perhaps best known for Desert of the Heart). Morra, a professor at Bishop's University in Montreal, discovered the memoir's manuscript among Rule's papers. In her introduction, she writes that the autobiography "sheds light on those figures who were key to [Rule's] intellectual, artistic, and sexual development" and likely was written in the late 1980s, just before she stopped writing. Rule's recall of the minutiae of her childhood is impressive, especially when she describes the people and experiences that shaped her writing, from her active and intellectually curious family to the rebelliousness that characterized her student years. Rule also writes of her growing attraction to women: her initial confusion ("I seemed to hold two mutually exclusive views, that my love represented what was best in me and that it was a sin.") and her eventual peace with her lesbianism. Whether it serves as an introduction to a new literary voice or an illumination of an already beloved one, this book offers fascinating insight into Rule's formative years as a provocateur, intellectual, lover, and writer. Photos. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.