Rule was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, on March 28, 1931, the daughter of Arthur Richard and Carlotta Jane Rule. In 1952, she earned a B.A. in English from Mills College and then, for a year, studied at University College, London. In 1956, she moved to Vancouver, British Columbia; from 1976 onward, she made her home on Galiano Island. She became a Canadian citizen in the 1960s.

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Teacher, author, and out lesbian, Rule was best known as a fiction writer. Her awards included the Canadian Authors' Association Award for Best Novel (1978), the Benson and Hedges Award for Best Short Stories (1978), the Literary Award of the Gay Academic Union (1978), the Fund for Human Dignity's Award of Merit (1983), and the Order of Canada (2007).

Rule's book of criticism, seven novels, and numerous short stories and essays address lesbian and gay issues to varying degrees, most often by presenting them as universal concerns. Though typically outcasts, her characters do not belong to a subculture; whether queer or straight, they participate in what she calls the human family, whose members' task it is to learn to get along with one another.

The cultivation of nurturing relationships and communities in the wake of obtrusive social "systems" is a predominant theme in her work, as is the appreciation for landscape and nature, which some critics have called a particularly Canadian motif.

Rule's first novel, Desert of the Heart (1964), recounts a lesbian love story via conventional Christian images and narrative strategies. By invoking and subverting representations of gender and sexual taboos from such canonical texts as the Bible, The Divine Comedy, and The Pilgrim's Progress, the two protagonists of this coming-out novel explore the significance of their involvement.

Self-consciously literary, Desert of the Heart offers an affirming, insightful, and optimistic depiction of lesbian love, one rare indeed in pre-Stonewall fiction. Dedicated to Rule's life partner Helen Sonthoff, the novel was made into the 1986 lesbian cult film Desert Hearts, directed by Donna Deitch.

Although interested in renegotiating mainstream literary paradigms, Rule saw her writing as free of any overt ideology; she did not align herself firmly with either lesbian feminist or separatist platforms. Her 1987 novel Memory Board, for example, examines aging and AIDS, not as political but as personal concerns to be dealt with in a matter-of-fact manner that nourishes human intimacy.

For Rule, politics had no place in art; the literary work arrives at its own truth or set of truths through the particular vision of the artist. This position, which also informs Lesbian Images (1975), a pioneering discussion of women writers and their treatment of love between women, risks being labeled naive and complacent: It neither acknowledges the ideological power of language (whereby the structures of thought used actually determine what is said) nor the inevitably political nature of proclaiming a nonpartisan stance.

Still, her fiction, especially in its delineation of character and theme, expresses a large-spirited commitment to diverse communities and a range of experiences.

Moreover, although she rejected the idea of political art, she was nevertheless a tireless fighter for glbtq rights and against censorship. From 1979 to 1985, she wrote essays and a regular column for Canada's gay liberation magazine The Body Politic, and supported Little Sister's Book and Art Emporium in its 15-year battle against the censorship of Canadian Customs.

Rule's novels and collections of short stories are all available from lesbian feminist publishers, having all been reprinted by Naiad Press in the United States and by Pandora Press in London.

Since Stonewall various political agendas have dominated American lesbian literature.

Since the 1960s, Canadian gay and lesbian writers have produced a vibrant body of fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry.

From the great modernist writers of the 1920s and 1930s to the pulp writers of the 1950s to the lesbian writers of today, lesbian novelists have had a powerful impact on the lesbian community.

With a constant influx of immigrants and a vigorous and adaptable economy, Vancouver is a progressive city with a large and active glbtq community.

Best known as editor of the early twentieth-century literary journal The Little Review, Margaret Anderson also published a frank lesbian novel and a three-volume autobiography.

Although pioneering film and television director Donna Deitch is best known for Desert Hearts, a classic of lesbian cinema, she has also made other films that probe gay and lesbian relationships

The network of independent gay and lesbian bookstores that arose in the 1970s served as incubators for the literary and cultural development of the modern gay rights movement in the United States and abroad.