Overview

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?

Full Product Details

Author:   Gillian Rose ,  Madeleine Pulman-Jones
Publisher:   Penguin Books Ltd
Imprint:   Penguin Classics
Dimensions:   Width: 13.00cm , Height: 0.70cm , Length: 19.80cm
Weight:   0.091kg
ISBN:  

9780241645499

ISBN 10:   0241645492
Pages:   112
Publication Date:   14 March 2024
Audience:   General/trade ,  College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  General ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Not yet available  
This item is yet to be released. You can pre-order this item and we will dispatch it to you upon its release.

Table of Contents

Reviews

I struggle to think of a finer, more rewarding short autobiography than this. Gillian Rose, professor of social and political thought at Warwick University, and dying of cancer at the age of 48, managed to complete and publish this before her time was up -- Nicholas Lezard * 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 * Powerful...a miracle * New York Times * 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 * The philosopher's laconic, lyrical memoir displays an unsettling yet wholly inspirational vigour in the face of life-threatening disease -- Lindesay Irvine * Guardian * 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 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 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 * 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 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 *

Intense and beautiful ... these intellectual struggles are all - rather miraculously - alive in this laconic, lyrical autobiography. It describes a troubled childhood in a turbulent Jewish family where the trauma of divorce was loaded on to the motional weight of history; it recounts romantic loves that are sometimes desperate, sometimes euphoric, and offers vivid, tender, and occasionally shocking portaits of many of her friends .... Love's Work is no polemic, but there is a fierceness here that defies both conventional wisdom and readers' self-reassurances * Guardian * Extraordinarily beautiful -- Olivia Laing A masterwork * 4Columns * Brilliant -- Giles Fraser A powerful and unsentimental chronicle * New Left Review * This small book contains multitudes ... it provokes, inspires and illuminates more profoundly than many a bulky volume, and it delivers what the title promises, a new allegory about love ... The book conveys how language can set courage against despair, and look hell in the eye * London Review of Books * Singular ... poetic and highly intellectual ... an emotive linking of pensees, a personal distillation of her philosopher's life ... This is that demanding and wonderful companion: the book-as-intelligence * Kirkus * 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 ... Lively, courageous, honest * Irish Times * 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 * An extraordinary bestselling book * Times Higher Education * Remarkable * Independent * Magnetic-elegant, unflinching, irreverent, and ferociously principled in its discussion of desire and affliction -- Merve Emre * New Yorker * Exquisite * Prospect * I struggle to think of a finer, more rewarding short autobiography than this ... For those who have suffered for and in love, this may prove to be one of the most useful books they will ever read * Nick Lezard *

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 A gem, filled with such lightly captured truths that sparkle with an elegance and clarity all the more striking for how hard-won they must have been. Grace and grief, wonder and agony, love and lovelessness are woven into an intricate motive of contradictions, a variation in motion, receding into the unbearably personal, before expanding again to what connects us all. I also found it brave and honest that it helped renew my faith in those rare virtues. I hope many find their way to it -- Hisham Matar Magnetic - elegant, unflinching, irreverent, and ferociously principled in its discussion of desire and affliction -- Merve Emre * New Yorker *

Author Information

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.

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