Desert of the Heart by Jane Rule (All Editions)

Possibly Jane Rule’s best known novel, The Desert of the Heart is the story of a free spirited woman falling for a repressed older woman. Evelyn Hall is taking respite at a ranch for women as she seeks a divorce after years of marriage. Written in 1964, it serves as a fascinating snapshot into the lives and regulations of women seeking their freedom.

Dr. Hall stays at a Nevada ranch where she meets, and falls for, Ann Child (‘Evelyn looked at Ann, the child she had always wanted, the friend she once had, the lover she never considered…’). Evelyn Hall has a hard time fitting in, and Jane Rule cleverly captures the feeling of a fish out of water time after time. ‘Whenever there were generalizations about women, Evelyn weighed herself against them and found herself insubstantial,’ writes Rule, capturing the alienation Evelyn has even from her own gender.

Genre: Canadian Eh; Grier Rated; Movie/Media Tie-In; Romance

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Comment

Jane Rule walks many thin lines in this book, whether the subject is ownership, freedom, convention or eroticism. Evelyn Hall, a university professor, comes to Reno to wait out the residence a Nevada divorce requires, and there meets Ann Childs, a younger woman who works in one of the casinos. Rule lets the attraction between them build slowly and seriously, and when it arrives she writes it with tenderness rather than shame: “Ann turned, the longing of her body straining against the last reluctance of her mind, and she felt Evelyn’s tentative, almost casual beginning gradually give way to an authority of love.”

Remember that this was written in 1964. Most lesbian novels of the day were paperback originals expected to end in heartbreak, madness or a return to men. Rule published hers as a serious literary novel, wrote her two women as intelligent adults weighing real choices, and let them have a future. It was her first novel, and the start of a career that made her one of the most respected voices in lesbian and gay writing.

Desert of the Heart stands as a tour de force in lesbian culture, still as warm and richly engaging today as when it was first written. Plus, it made a great movie: Donna Deitch’s Desert Hearts (1985), with Helen Shaver and Patricia Charbonneau, brought the story to a new generation and became a landmark of its own, one of the first films to give a lesbian love story a happy ending.

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