Love’s Work

Description

‘This small book contains multitudes’ Marina Warner
‘For those who have suffered for and in love, this may prove to be one of the most useful books they will ever read’ Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

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?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

This beautiful memoir comes right from a genuinely thoughtful heart. It is good to find that philosophizing can offer its age-old consolations so present tensely—Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

An autobiographical narrative of astonishing power which intertwines threads of philosophy and personal life—Times Higher Education

Remarkable … Memory, confession, abstract ideas and Rose’s candid accounts of her failure in love feature in a work which is both haunting and utterly matter of fact—Irish Times

Exquisite—Prospect

A poetic and highly intellectual memoir that encourages us to read the mare’s nest of grotesqueries that is our world of pain, illness, and trauma as a birthing-ground for the complex beauty of human relationships—Kirkus Reviews

Part intellectual coming-of-age tale and part spiritual memoir, Rose’s search for the soul takes her on a wildly dizzying ride through despair and hope, sickness and healing, love and death—Library Journal

A masterwork—4Columns

Brilliant—Giles Fraser

Powerful and unsentimental—New Left Review

Into Love’s Work Rose concentrated the essence of her life and thought. It dwells on sickness and mortality, on friendship and betrayal, on the most intimately personal and the most sublimely universal—The Times

There are few philosophical works as momentous and yet as personal as this one—Catherine Pickstock

Magnetic – elegant, unflinching, irreverent, and ferociously principled in its discussion of desire and affliction—Merve Emre, New YorkerMadeleine Pulman-Jones was born in London. Her poems, essays, and translations have appeared in publications including PN Review and Modern Poetry in Translation.GB

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