This Is Not for You.

Robin Chamberlain is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University.

This reprint of Jane Rule’s second novel, originally published in 1970, makes available to a new generation an important piece of lesbian literary history in North America. Rule began writing the novel in 1965, but it is set beginning in 1951, and therefore deals with a difficult and, to many readers today, unimaginable, period in queer history. The novel is not merely of historical interest, however, but is both literary and enjoyable.

This Is Not for You is told in the first person by heroine Kate George. Kate is closeted, and readers experience her self-loathing, anxiety, and desperation through her narration. She is caught in the stifling hypocrisy of white middle-class respectability, and readers will not find a better depiction of the closet mentality. The book takes the form of a letter that is “not for” the woman Kate loves, Esther (the “you” of the title). It tells Kate and Esther’s story from its beginnings at a women’s college in 1951 to Esther’s initiation into an all-female silent religious order in 1965. The novel represents both Kate’s denial of her love for Esther and her attempt to deny Esther’s absence.

As the title suggests, the love Kate has for Esther is something she cannot admit, often even to herself, and is something she tries to shield Esther from. Indeed, denial is the major theme in the novel, as Kate learns that to attempt to fit into mainstream culture means denying various aspects of one’s identity. These aspects include not only sexuality, but gender and race as well. Thus, the novel shows how deeply intertwined homophobia, misogyny, and racism often—perhaps always—are in lived experience.

Although This Is Not for You is set half a century ago, these are issues as pertinent today as they were then. Kate’s experience may be formally different from that of a lesbian woman in North America today, but many of the issues—both personal and societal—remain the same.