Jane Rule Libri

A modern classic of race, labor rights, and lesbian love. Brought together by the tragic death of an infant, black and white women at a North Carolina textile factory join together to strike against the plant's unfeeling management. A story of race relations and the power of grassroots organizing, this absorbing novel becomes a love story when two very different women in the group fall for each other. Speaking first to the value of labor and the realities of homophobia and racism, this story also celebrates the transformative power of love in the lives of marginalized women.

In this fluid, often witty novel set on a small rural island off the coast of Vancouver, five solitary women at different stages in life learn how to function alone as well as together. Canadian-Japanese Karen, who has left her lesbian lover of eight years, befriends Red, a young woman with an unknown background who cleans houses for three others--acrid Milly, divorced by her husband after a 20-year marriage; Henrietta, whose husband is institutionalized in Vancouver; and Miss James, an eccentric, elderly spinster. Birth, illness and death follow one another, uniting the five independent and incisively drawn protagonists. "All that time I was trying to teach you how to live alone and really take care of yourself, I was teaching myself, too," Henrietta tells Red. The resulting warmth is not saccharine but realistic, as Rule illuminates the vagaries and pain of abandonment and loss, and the fragile joy of new bonds.

Two women meet and fall in love in Reno, Nevada. Evelyn Hall has gone there to get a divorce from her husband; Ann Childs works there as a change girl in a gambling casino. The movie Desert Heartsis based on this first novel by Jane Rule.

Outlander vereint kunstvolle Kurzgeschichten über die vielfältigen Facetten lesbischen Lebens mit scharfsinnigen Essays zu Themen wie Sexualität in der Literatur, Homophobie und Geschlechterkrieg.