[Lesbian Images] intends to show what it means to be a lesbian who characterizes her reality in art; who shows "truth in the rich particular rather than in the lowest common denominator of a hundred case histories." These "images" of 12 novelists and literary personalities (13, when we count Jane Rule's own story) are, more than any other thing, a novelist's accomplishment—a skillful interweaving of plot and psychology, temperament and circumstance, life and work. And those who love Jane Rule's fiction … will find themselves once again keeping pleasureable company with the novelist who brought civilizing sense to the heartbreak-and-booze tradition in modern lesbian fiction. Lesbian Images is first and foremost a nonfictional development of one of Jane Rule's fictional concerns: to reveal the human symmetry of the lesbian; to dissipate the grotesque stereotypes….

Unfortunately, the same qualities that generally give grace and strength to Jane Rule's prose and its...