Desert of the Heart

When Jane Rule's first novel, Desert of the Heart, was published in 1964, it was an auspicious beginning for a writer who would build a reputation on her unflinching views about sexuality, relationships and the painful constrictions of societal convention. Even more astonishing is the way in which the novel has retained its cool quiet beauty and power of expression decades later. Evelyn Hall is a literature professor who travels to the divorce capital of mid-century America, Reno, Nevada, in the summer of 1958 to put an end to her disastrous sixteen-year marriage. She is divorcing her husband for his own good and on the advice of his psychiatrist because, this being the 1950s, the doctor believes that Evelyn's career success is causing her husband's feelings of inferiority and depression. At the boarding house where she stays to fulfill the six-week residency required for a quickie divorce, Evelyn meets Ann Childs. Ann is most alluring in her representation of freedom to Evelyn, from