In her reader Lesbian Images, Jane Rule, herself a professed and practising lesbian, attempts to debunk the time-honoured theories that homosexuality is a sin and/or a sickness. For the most part she is successful, amassing a great deal of evidence to shore up her arguments about what lesbianism isn't. Unhappily she doesn't enlighten us much about what it is, claiming magisterially, "the reality of lesbian experience transcends all theories about it." (p. 87)

Rule argues that psychological theorists and practitioners who insist that lesbianism is a sickness are dangerous in that they often produce traumas in individuals who before suffered from nothing but a loving preference for their own sex. Lesbians, she complains, endure prejudices as ill-considered and unfounded as those traditionally heaped against left-handed people. The analogy is apt, for examples abound of the sorry repercussions of "correcting" a child's left-handedness. But what about the male and female homosexuals who genuinely believe they are sick and who want desperately to be cured? Won't they be tossed out along with the taboos?

Rule admits she is a polemicist…. Still, admitting her biases doesn't excuse her frequently sloppy logic or the strident tone with which she condemns anti-lesbian arguments.

Where is the merciless scrutiny that flayed such enemies as Father David Ford and Dr. David Reuben when Rule takes on current feminist literati? The chapter on recent non-fiction reads more like a progress report on the problems and strife within the women's movement than anything else, with Rule displaying an annoying reticence as though she were trying to placate all factions at once.

Certainly her own sense of separateness from lesbians who refuse or are unable to accept traditional roles of loyalty and commitment in their relationships is told much more effectively in fiction. In "My Country Wrong", one of the stories included in her collection Theme for Diverse Instruments, the narrator is on a Christmas trip from Canada to her native California. She looks up some old friends, including Lynn who takes her to a gay party. Lynn is obviously and desperately on the make, but it is the narrator who seems awkward, out of place, even faintly anachronistic in her "navy silk with a green silk coat." At one point the narrator, herself a lesbian, says, "I don't believe in fidelity though it is for me the only practical way to live." Like her narrator Rule seems slightly in awe of women who have abandoned (surpassed?) emotional bonds. (pp. 87-8)

[Rule explores] with candour and intelligence … the changing images of women as expressed through the lives and writings of more than a dozen widely read novelists. They range from women who wanted to be men … to women who were emotionally but not sexually engaged with other women … to women who recognized and tried to suppress the lesbian sides of their natures … to women proud to be women and lesbians…. Aside from any emotional responses we may have to the sufferings and uncertainties of these women, Rule's careful scholarship and sharp insights provide both a sturdy framework and a context for examining women's literature. To say Lesbian Images is timely is absurd; it is long past due.

Few of the stories in Theme for Diverse Instruments are about lesbianism per se, but they are all about women and loving relationships. Mainly Rule's women are stumbling through a maze of apprehensions, conditionings, and stereotypings as they grope towards a better understanding of themselves and others. It is a hard struggle and that's why so many of the characters seem alone and adrift, even sometimes alienated.

Rule begins by giving us a positive myth about women. The allegorical title story "Theme for Diverse Instruments" explores a matriarchical family where the women are prolific and dominant and the men by contrast infertile and ineffectual. (p. 88)

The myth established, we move on to the girl child. In "My Father's House" a little girl is playing with her elder brother and a friend. That is they are playing and she is joining in whenever they let her. In her isolation the little girl muses about a drawing in her colouring book and decides, "If she was going to be in the picture she'd have to draw herself in." "Drawing herself in" is precisely the problem facing women and the task that Rule has set herself in these stories. She succeeds admirably and yet I found this key story tainted by a slickness and a coyness. It seemed too pat, too simple. (pp. 88-9)

[In] "Invention for Shelagh", Rule gives us herself. Ostensibly this is a series of journal entries—random notes for a letter to a close friend—but it becomes a clever and intimate collage. Rule weaves a delicate pattern amongst the abstract jottings that culminates in a self-portrait which depicts a woman who has confronted sex, career, money, identity, etc., and emerged as a loving, honest person….

Lesbian Images and Theme for Diverse Instruments reinforce each other so completely that it is almost as though Rule consciously wrote one to complement the other. Together they make a marriage. (p. 89)