"Inland Passage" and Other Stories is a 1985 collection of short fiction by Canadian author Jane Rule. Famous for her exploration of LGBT (and specifically Lesbian) themes in her writings, Rule continues to explore same-sex relationships between women in the collection: the titular story, for example, tells the story of two women who fall in love aboard a ship in the "Inland"/Inside Passage of the Pacific Northwest. According to Sandra Martin of The Globe and Mail, Rule "explored the conflict between desire and convention and the constriction that fear can extol on intimacy, joyfulness and freedom."
Rule was a kind of social outcast from a young age; she was "gangly and awkward. . . she grew to her full height of 6 feet by the time she was 12, and suffered in school from a husky voice, dyslexia and from being the perpetual new kid" due to her family moving around often while her father served in World War II. She began to discover her sexual identity around age 15 when "she read Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness and 'suddenly discovered that [she] was a freak, a genetic monster, a member of a third sex...' as she wrote later in Lesbian Images."
In her mid-20s, Rule accepted a teaching position at Concord Academy in Massachusetts, where she met and fell in love with a woman named Helen Sonthoff (who was, at the time, married to Herbert Sonthoff, a political refugee from World War II Germany). Rule moved to Vancouver with her close friend (and later alleged lover) John Hulcoop; however, Hulcoop ended up marrying another woman, and Rule ended up rekindling her relationship with Helen Sonthoff when the latter "came to Vancouver for a holiday with Ms. Rule that extended into a life long commitment - after an 'amicable' divorce from her husband."
Rule and Sonthoff became Canadian citizens in the the early 1960s; Rule's first and best-known novel--Desert of the Heart--was published in 1964 after 22 rejections from publishers. In 1976, almost ten years prior to the publication of "Inland Passage" and Other Stories, Rule and Sonthoff "purchased a home on Galiano, population 1,000 - a lush ribbon of green, 50 ferry minutes and worlds away from the mainland - initially as a getaway and chance to socialize with a group of artists and writer friends": in Rule's own words, she moved to the island "to write and lead a private life."
Rule also continued to publish fiction and more overtly political works, such as a number of essays and articles in the Canadian LGBT magazine The Body Politic. The same year that "Inland Passage" and Other Stories was published, Desert of the Heart was turned into a movie titled Desert Hearts by American director Donna Deitch. Rule was awarded the Order of British Columbia in 1998. Helen Sonthoff passed away in 2000, prompting Rule to "[write] a painfully beautiful meditation on grief that appeared in Go Big, another publication (now defunct) from Pink Triangle Press (publisher of both The Body Politic and Xtra)." The next year, she came under fire from the LGBT community for her opposition to same-sex marriage, saying "To be forced back into the heterosexual cage of coupledom is not a step forward but a step back into state-imposed definitions of relationship."
Rule was admitted to the prestigious Order of Canada in 2007. Just months later, while struggling with liver cancer, she "refused any radical treatment that would involve leaving Galiano" and quietly passed away at her home.
