Rita Mae Brown says she came into the world knowing exactly what she wanted: “Horses, hounds, and literature.” The activist and writer, who is also master of hounds at the Oak Ridge Fox Hunt Club in Charlottesville, Va., is outside on her farm in Afton, Va. in search of a phone signal.

She has around 20 hounds and 12 horses; she used to have many more. She says she’s always preferred animals to people. “Some of my horses are almost 40 years old,” says Brown. “I’m looking at two of them that are 38. You come to this farm, you live forever.”

Brown is coming to town hall this Friday, Oct. 18 for a conversation with award-winning author Felice Cohen; it’s part of the 40th anniversary celebration of Women’s Week in Provincetown.

Brown’s first novel, the semi-autobiographical Rubyfruit Jungle, was the first of its kind: an explicitly lesbian narrative told in the first person by the unapologetically sexy and ambitious narrator, Molly Bolt. Like Brown, Bolt grows up in Pennsylvania and Florida and makes her unlikely way to New York City. She gets an education in spite of her poverty. She loves women and isn’t afraid to say it.

Published in 1973 by Daughters, Inc., Rubyfruit Jungle sold 70,000 copies in hardcover and more than a million copies as a Bantam paperback. The poet Eileen Myles called it “the quintessential dyke coming-of-age novel.” It’s hilariously obscene, the language both shocking and delightful. Bolt’s frustrations become opportunities for witty, cutting observations about the world; sexual encounters are often ridiculous. “Things are funny when they don’t make sense,” says Brown.

“I just got bored with everybody being so damn serious in the women’s movement,” she says. “I thought, ‘I want to have a giggle.’ ”

Bolt’s voice is effortlessly original. It explodes from the page, overheard rather than read. Her self-image is not dependent on others’ approval. “I can’t like anybody if I don’t like myself,” says Bolt. “Period.”

Brown went on to write nine more novels, five nonfiction books, and two collections of poetry.

Vicky Barstow, who works at Womencrafts in Provincetown, is a fan. She first read Rubyfruit Jungle in the ’70s. “We were reading books like The Well of Loneliness, which was very depressing,” she says. “Publishing houses apparently would not publish lesbian novels unless there was a tragic ending.” Brown’s novel was no tragedy. “It was a celebration of her little gay self,” says Barstow.

She says that a line in Brown’s novel Six of One, published in 1978, has stuck with her: one character says that “love multiplies, it doesn’t divide.”

Rubyfruit Jungle has a permanent spot on the shelf labeled “My First Lesbian Book” at Womencrafts. Many people read the book in private, says Michelle Axelson, the shop’s owner. The title means vagina; the main character rejects conformity in language and behavior (she has sex without shame); the whole thing is like a dark secret. Brown’s appearance here will be “a beautiful thing,” says Axelson. She predicts that hundreds of women who had private moments with the book will come. “It makes me think of an Indigo Girls concert.”

Many wrote to Brown after her first novel was published, says Axelson. “She would write back and often engaged in long relationships with people.” Brown had come out at a time when many didn’t. “She became this elder, this sage who people could reach out to.”

“I was raised where if somebody writes you a letter, you write back,” says Brown about those times and relationships.

One woman who was visiting Womencrafts told Axelson that she’d written to Brown when she was a teenager. Brown wrote back to her on a postcard. “The girl came home from school, and the postcard was sitting there on her bed, which meant that her mother had seen it,” says Axelson. “She said that her story in life has been that Rita Mae Brown outed her — in a loving way.”

In the ’60s, as an undergraduate at NYU, Brown was active in the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, and the feminist movement. She joined the National Organization for Women but resigned in 1970 after its president, Betty Friedan, called lesbians “the lavender menace” and the organization began to distance itself from lesbian groups. In the early ’70s, Brown became a founding member of the Furies Collective in Washington, D.C., which maintained that heterosexuality was the root of all oppression.

She also played a leading role in an informal group of radical feminists who called themselves the Lavender Menace and conducted a “zap” of the Second Congress to Unite Women on May 1, 1970 in Manhattan. She and other lesbians invaded the event, took over the speakers’ microphone, and distributed their manifesto, “The Woman-Identified Woman” — 10 paragraphs beginning with a question and answer: “What is a lesbian? A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion.” The women wore lavender T-shirts printed with their group’s name. At one point, Brown pulled off her shirt to reveal another beneath it. The audience’s gasps turned into laughter. She’s always been funny, even while fighting.

Axelson says her relationship to Brown has to do mostly with those moments. Brown was an agent of change, a catalyst; she was determined to expose the raw and untreated wound that heterosexuality and heteronormativity had inflicted on the world.

Brown says she doesn’t look back much. Sure, things have changed since her youth. But isn’t that obvious? “Nobody grows old without seeing change,” she says. “Some changes you like, some you don’t.”

She’s a storyteller — an award-winning writer of literary fiction, mysteries, poetry, and nonfiction. Stories depend on change. “And a good story,” she says, “is one that includes your audience. You’re not telling them how goddamn smart you are. A good story brings people in, and they bring their life to the story.”

As for reflection, she says, “Whatever happens behind me, not a damn thing I can do about it.” She’s only 79 years old, and she has a farm where things live forever. “My whole life is in front of me.”

Not Going Back

The event: Rita Mae Brown in conversation with Felice Cohen
The time: Friday, Oct. 18, 1 p.m.
The place: Provincetown Town Hall, 260 Commercial St.
The cost: $35 general admission at eventbrite.com