Love's Work

An extraordinary, uncompromising and consoling celebration of a life - through childhood, faith, family, love, friendship, pain and loss - written as its author was facing her own mortality

Gillian Rose was a star academic, acclaimed as one of the most dazzling and original thinkers of her time. Told that she had incurable cancer, she found a new way to explore the world and herself. Tender, heartbreakingly honest and written with moments of surprising humour, Love's Work is the exhilarating result.

In this short, unforgettable memoir, Rose looks back on her childhood, from the young dyslexic girl, torn between father and stepfather, to the adolescent confronting her Jewish inheritance. As an adult, Gillian Rose proves herself a passionate friend, a searcher for truth, a woman in love and, finally, an exacting but generous patient.

Intertwining the personal and the philosophical, Rose meditates on faith, conflict and injustice; the fallibility and endurance of love; our yearning for independence and for connection to others. With droll self-knowledge ('I am highly qualified in unhappy love affairs,' Rose writes) and with unsettling wisdom ('To live, to love, is to be failed'), Love's Work asks the unanswerable question: how is a life best lived?

Review

Powerful...a miracle ― New York Times

In its emphasis on the work of living, suffering, and loving, this is a masterpiece of the autobiographer's art, intense and rationally decorous at the same time -- Edward Said

Extraordinarily beautiful -- Olivia Laing

Magnificent...Makes whatever else has been written on the deepest issues of human life by the philosophers of our time seem intolerably abstract and even frivolous -- Arthur Danto

This small book contains multitudes...It provokes, inspires, and illuminates more profoundly than many a bulky volume, and it delivers what its title promises, a new allegory about love -- Marina Warner ― London Review of Books

Rich, satisfying, desirable ... I struggle to think of a finer, more rewarding short autobiography than this -- Nicholas Lezard ― Guardian

The philosopher's laconic, lyrical memoir displays an unsettling yet wholly inspirational vigour in the face of life-threatening disease -- Lindesay Irvine ― Guardian

This is not a pastel reverie, but a work in which the author, an English philosopher, feminist, and Marxist, not only bares her soul but carefully dissects it...Rose develops by contrast her notion of love's work: the obligation to go on thinking and caring in spite of the certainty of physical and moral defeat. Gillian Rose died shortly after completing this rigorous and lyrical book ― Boston Review

Sears the page it occupies ― Philadelphia Inquirer

About the Author

Gillian Rose
Gillian Rose studied philosophy at the Universities of Oxford, Columbia and Berlin. She was Professor at the University of Warwick where she worked in modern European philosophy, social and political thought, and theology. Her books include Dialectic of Nihilism, The Broken Middle, Judaism and Modernity and Hegel. She died in December 1995.

Madeleine Pulman-Jones
Madeleine Pulman-Jones was born in London. Her poems, essays, and translations have appeared in publications including PN Review and Modern Poetry in Translation.