Jane Vance Rule, 28 March 1931 – 27 November 2007) was a Canadian writer of lesbian-themed novels and non-fiction. She died at age 76 after a battle with liver cancer. Her partner of almost 50 years Helen Sonthoff died in 2000.

In 1964, Rule published Desert of the Heart, after 22 rejections from publishers. The novel featured two women who fall in love with each other and caused Rule to receive a flood of letters from "very unhappy, even desperate" women who felt they were alone and would be miserable. The novel caused her to be sought out by Canadian media, and Rule later wrote, "I became, for the media, the only lesbian in Canada. A role I gradually and very
reluctantly accepted and used to educate people as I could." In 1976, she moved to Galiano Island and remained there until the end of her life. Rule's novel was later made into a movie by Donna Deitch, released as Desert Hearts (1985), which quickly became a lesbian classic. The Globe and Mail said of it, "the film is one of the first and most highly regarded works in which a lesbian relationship is depicted favourably."

She read Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness at 15 and "suddenly discovered that I was a freak, a genetic monster, a member of a third sex..." she wrote in Lesbian Images.

Rule and Sonthoff lived together until Sonthoff's death in 2000. Rule surprised some in the gay community by declaring herself against gay marriage, writing, "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. With all that we have learned, we should be helping our heterosexual brothers and sisters out of their state-defined prisons, not volunteering to join them there."

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