Foreword

I first met Jane Rule and Helen Sonthoff in 1964.I was twenty-four.I had just arrived in Vancouver to teach in the English Department at the University of British Columbia, on the lowest rung of the academic totem pole; my job included teaching grammar to engineering students at 8:30 in the morning, in a Quonset hut left over from the Second World War.This was more fun than it sounds, but only because nobody was awake.This was my first academic teaching job, my first time in Vancouver, and my first trip across Canada, and Jane and Helen were my first lesbians.Or the first lesbians I knew about.I have since learned there were others; they'd been in hiding then, as most were.But I didn't think of Jane and Helen primarily as lesbians: they were simply two wonderful people who happened to be living together, and who were very welcoming to newcomers.I hadn't consideredat that age -what they must have gone through to reach that relatively joyful and tranquil space.Jane and Helen were friends of friends, but in my case they went above and beyond what good manners and such a second-hand acquaintance might have dictated.They helped me rent an apartment, and lent me some crockery and utensils to put into it; they lent me the card table on which, later that year, I was to compose my first published novel, The Edible Woman.They also kindly invited me to the parties they gave -poets, writers, painters, people from the university, and waifs and strays.I fit into several of these categories, and certainly into the waifs and strays.Both of them had a genius for listening: they were interested in just about everything, and they also understood life crises, having already been through several of these themselves.Indeed, they seemed to be running a sort of halfway house for the life-crisis waifs.

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