In 2008, the year following the death, at 76, of Jane Rule, an academic named Linda M. Morra made a startling discovery. Among the late author’s papers at the University of British Columbia, she found an undocumented, handwritten autobiography covering Rule’s life up to age 21. It is a beautiful piece of dryly ironic writing, deeply thought out and intellectually honest, almost to the point of pain. Morra has edited this volume with loving, scholarly care.

Rule, the author of Desert of the Heart and other important books dealing with lesbianism and lesbian culture, was born in New Jersey and lived at various times in the Chicago and St. Louis areas, but grew up mostly in California. Her parents and grandparents don’t seem to have been particularly cultured, but were part of that now almost vanished breed, middle-class folks with a little inherited capital. Rule’s world was one of private girls’ schools, live-in help, and dancing lessons, all leading to the obligatory trip to England and Europe.

She hated the dancing classes in particular, “facing for the first time the possibility that my height [six feet] was not a natural superiority, but a fault.” In the parlance of the time, she was a tomboy: at seven, “a fair swimmer and a crudely accomplished soccer player.” When entering her teens, she was “chiefly aware of a great capacity to suffer without the experience to spend it on.”

Rule addresses her sexuality in an honest and forthright manner. In one moving passage, she writes, “There was no one moment when I confronted my own sexuality. Consciously, I didn’t desire” any of the young women she knew, all of whom “obviously assumed I was a lesbian.… I was blind with outraged innocence, but I suppose I must have seemed for each of them a sexual time bomb that could go off at any moment…. No one ever mentioned that loving me would be a criminal offence.”

As for her family, Rule takes a hard line on most of them, especially her brother, whom, in an interesting turn of phrase, she refers to as “an ideal public brother.” According to Rule, he was “vain about his clothes, entirely bored with school, secretive about where he went, what he thought or felt, if he did either.”

By the end of this fascinating self-portrait, the reader is left with the vivid impression that society and Rule (who lived in B.C. from 1956 onward) eventually came to terms with each other, but that she never quite forgave her past for being what it was.