[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 content—discernment, good manners, compassion, tolerance—tend to resolve this collection of extraordinarily diverse women into a kind of sisterhood of lesbian sameness, as though each had been reborn as Jane Rule herself….

There seems no other justification—other than the author's need for "heritage"—for linking Radclyffe Hall's preposterous images of martyrdom with the bisexual appetites of Colette; the onanistic fantasies of Leduc with the frail melodramas of Dorothy Baker; the dated Freudianism of Duffy with the asexual satire of Compton-Burnett. We are by now as familiar with the "male-identification" of Gertrude Stein and Radclyffe Hall as we are with the genius of the former and the stupidity of the latter. (p. 106)

Jane Rule's contribution is no news, as either traditional or feminist insight. Attempts to restore to us women whose lives and work have been distorted by "moral smugness, prejudice veiled in literary language, and embarrassed silence" are praiseworthy—and have been praised both in and out of the Women's Movement for several years. The central chapters of Lesbian Images make a point, however, that the author did not intend: sometimes the work of these women has been affected by lesbianism, but much more frequently it has been shaped by other factors, such as class, nationality, and blind loyalty to the patriarchal status quo.

Jane Rule describes lesbian "images"; but she has not defined lesbian literature or the sensibility that would lead us to evaluate it as a separate genre, with shared characteristics and feelings. Possibly because one does not exist. Neither heterosexuality nor lesbianism alone can create a cultural sensibility that in turn materializes as art. Difference—and literary genre—is first brought into being by shared metaphysical assumptions about the world and what we would like to happen in it. Jane Rule's images of lesbians are those of lesbians who share nothing in common but a desire to write. Both the known biographical facts and the vast dissimilarities in the emotional and material content of their works would not encourage us to presume an erotic conformity among them. Their writings, far from being the product of a purely lesbian imagination, are the reverse—part and parcel of the "heterosexual culture" whose domination Jane Rule so rightfully deplores.

Those lesbians who are attempting to make art informed by feminism rather than commanded by heterosexuality, who are imagining a present and a future tense in literature rather than inventing a "heritage," Jane Rule relegates to a few casual mentions in the back of the book…. [Rule] dismisses … all lesbian fiction with a feminist political bias. Art, she believes, is no fit place for politics.

Lesbian "images" become lesbian sensibility only when infused by what feminists understand as "consciousness." To realize consciousness as art is a long and arduous process, but one which every emerging civilization undergoes. When the zeal of the new lesbian-feminist writers seems less artistically satisfying than the conciliatory survival patterns of the old lesbian worlds, Jane Rule should remind herself of the remark she quotes from Stein's Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas: "When you make a thing, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly, but those that do it after you they don't have to worry about making it and they can make it pretty, and so everyone can like it when the others make it." Lesbian Images is a love affair with a "pretty" past. (pp. 106, 110)