In the more than thirty years since the British-Jewish philosopher Gillian Rose’s death, aged 48, from cancer, the feminist and cultural critic Jacqueline Rose has said little publicly about her sister’s life, death, conversion to Christianity, or their relationship. She has reflected on Gillian Rose as a philosopher—most notably in the closing essay to her collection The Last Resistance—but less as a sister. Nor has she said much about Love’s Work, the philosophical memoir that would belatedly bring Gillian to fame beyond a small but nonetheless intensely devoted circle of academic readers.
One exception is a comment she made in a 2003 interview with The Guardian: ‘I admire her book [Love’s Work],’ Jacqueline said, ‘and I love it for what it did for Gillian in the writing of it, but it is not my story and it is not a story I would have told.’ Jacqueline appears named on only one page—in fact, in only one sentence—of the book. But this is not necessarily a snub. Love’s Work is an extraordinary memoir, unfolding through a series of interlocking vignettes and choice episodes featuring friends, passionate love affairs, faith, and illness, but it does not attempt to capture the full sweep of Gillian’s life.
What story would Jacqueline have told? In the wake of Gillian’s death, Jacqueline resisted her literary agent’s suggestion that she write her own memoir about Gillian. ‘It’s still too close and too many people are alive,’ she explained in a 2011 interview. ‘But I did have a plan—and still do, in a way—to write a book about Edith Stein.’ At first, this remark about a German philosopher who died in 1942 might sound like a non-sequitur. But the parallels between the lives of Gillian Rose and Edith Stein are striking: most obviously, their engagements with the German philosophical tradition (for Rose, Hegel; Stein, Husserl) and their controversial conversions to Christianity (Rose, to Anglicanism; Stein, to Catholicism—ultimately becoming a nun and a saint). The connection extends even to Auschwitz: Stein was murdered there in 1942; nearly fifty years later, Rose worked as a consultant for the Future of Auschwitz commission, where her warnings against the sacralisation of the Holocaust into an event beyond comprehension went unheeded.
Jacqueline began a book on Stein and Rose, then abandoned it—although, as Hannah Zeavin has argued, much of Jacqueline’s work since Gillian’s death, even up to her 2023 work The Plague, might be read as an indirect attempt to grapple with the meaning of Gillian’s loss, even if Gillian herself is rarely mentioned. But now, that long-gestating project has finally found its form in Two Women, a daring and moving novel which lightly fictionalises and intertwines the lives of Rose and Stein. There is inevitably some overlap with Love’s Work in time and place: the secular Jewish childhood in Hayes, Middlesex; the disillusion with Oxford University; the adventures in sex, drugs, and philosophy in New York with Rose’s friend and lover Jim (here named Ken); and her academic career at the universities of Sussex and Warwick. But unlike Jacqueline’s first and only other novel, Albertine (2001), which retells Proust’s À la recherche from the perspective of its narrator’s lover, the Rose-narrative in Two Women is not simply Love’s Work from another point of view. Much of it is new: a fictional reconstruction of the life Gillian did not depict in Love’s Work and, above all, of the relationship between the two sisters. Two Women is not another version of Gillian’s memoir, then, but a novel about what it means to live alongside another life—whether in sisterhood or across the gulf of history—and to tell that life through the prism of another.
The novel begins with a brief frame narrative, a kind of ‘editor’s note’ by ‘HS’, a friend of Rosa Edelblum’s sister Clara—the novel’s pseudonyms for Gillian and Jacqueline, respectively. HS has been entrusted with two manuscripts: one, written by Clara (Jacqueline) in third person, telling the life story of her sister, the philosopher Rosa (Gillian); the other, written by Rosa, telling the life-story of Esther Felsenstein—the novel’s name for Edith Stein. What follows are these narratives, alternating between lives, times, and places. In the odd chapters we follow Esther, 1891–1942, from Breslau to Auschwitz; in the even chapters, we follow Rosa, 1947–1995, from Hayes to Leamington Spa, via Oxford and New York—two lives, separated by time and place, but bound together by a subtle web of repetition and resemblance. (It is perhaps not a coincidence that the literary critic and philosopher Louis Klee has recently drawn on Gillian Rose’s idea of the broken middle in theorising what he calls ‘the double novel’ form—of which Two Women might be an example.)
In a sense, this comparative model is one that Jacqueline Rose has assumed before, though in non-fiction. Her 2014 book Women in Dark Times draws implicit parallels between the unlikely triplet of Rosa Luxemburg, Charlotte Salomon, and Marilyn Monroe. It could well have been titled Three Women. This echoes, in turn, the three women brought into dialogue in the epic central ‘Love and the State’ chapter of Gillian Rose’s 1992 The Broken Middle: Rahel Varnhagen, Hannah Arendt, and again Rosa Luxemburg. Above all, what these works share—including this new novel—is a focus on Jewish women from different times as they confront and navigate the pressures of history, politics, and femininity; in each, their lives are illuminated through their encounter with one another in writing.
This method of juxtaposition is particularly revealing when it comes to Rosa’s and Esther’s conversions to Christianity—not so much conversions from Judaism as conversions with it, for neither ever renounces their Jewish heritage or the resources of the tradition. For Esther, the gradual journey towards faith is shaped by a range of personal and historical forces: her philosophical work on the meaning of empathy, her disappointments in love, and her experience as a wartime Red Cross nurse caring for the infected as they died. Above all, it is influenced by her ‘befuddlement’ at the fact of death. Even from a young age, she wonders, ‘How were you meant to face the collapse of earthly existence if there was no other spiritual world to receive you? What would a religion look like that made dying no more, or less, than a staging post on the path of faith?’
For Rosa, meanwhile, inching towards faith is driven by a yearning to find a ‘divine or mystical inspiration in a God-free world’ while excluding ‘nothing and no one—no wretchedness, no human weakness, no sensuous being’. She finds this vision in the life of St. Augustine—in his youthful sinfulness as much as in his later sainthood. For Rosa, ‘it was the dedication he brought to vice and virtue alike that shone from his story, and told the true tale.’
Here emerges a difference between Esther’s and Rosa’s devotion. Esther, in her piety, adopts a life of increasing austerity, shut away in the Carmelite convent, even refusing to eat. For Rosa, meanwhile, a faithful life involves not only the combination of Christian and Jewish thought but also the wedding of the contemplative and the erotic, the sacred and the profane. Rosa’s task, we read, is to ‘pluck the threads of this dilemma. She would never renounce her physical being in the world.’ Babette’s Feast becomes her guide in this endeavour: the 1987 film in which a Parisian chef prepares an opulent banquet for a Puritan community whose rigid asceticism is, for one evening, overcome by the sensual pleasures of food.
The real Gillian Rose liked to joke that her first book, The Melancholy Science (1978), started life as a cookbook. Here, with the semi-fictional Rosa at least, we are told that this was literally true: she signed a contract with Macmillan for a cookery book that never saw the light of day. Philosophy and pleasure, in other words, are deeply intertwined: ‘The empire of the senses,’ in the novel’s terms, ‘percolated through her very being.’ From food to philosophy to sex, ‘My erotic attachments,’ Rosa tells Clara, are always ‘hot on the heels of how I think.’ It is not a coincidence, then, that the flourishing of Rosa’s sex life at Oxford coincides with Marx becoming, for her, an ‘in-dweller’: ‘No politics without Eros. Rosa’s clarion call.’
The interplay between one life and another extends, however, beyond Rosa and Esther to a wider network of parallels and associations, both across the narratives and within them. This is one of the novel’s great accomplishments and one of the features that moves it beyond the formal conceit of two parallel lives towards something more intricate: a web of connections in which details in one life acquire new significance when they reappear in another. For example, we actually learn more explicit detail about the conversion of Rosa and Clara’s mother to Christianity than we do about Rosa’s—compelled in part, it is suggested, by her affair with a divorced Catholic. To readers of Love’s Work, this will echo the affair that Gillian had with a Catholic priest, otherwise conspicuously unmentioned in the novel. We learn, too, of the conflicting and shifting reactions of the three sisters to their mother’s conversion, ranging from rage and a sense of betrayal to acceptance. This finds a parallel in Esther’s family, whose initial horror at her conversion is followed ultimately by the conversion of her sister. Adding yet another layer of intricacy, it cannot be a coincidence that the real Edith Stein’s sister who converted was named Rosa.
This concurrence of names begins to answer the question of why the names in the novel were changed at all. The pseudonyms are, after all, hardly concealing. In an article in the London Review of Books on Sylvia Plath, Jacqueline rails against the critical tendency to reduce Plath’s poetry to her life: ‘This is not a biography,’ she writes of her own analysis of Plath. The lived life is crucial, but it is a point of departure rather than arrival. To pretend otherwise, she writes, is at worst ‘a kind of insult: don’t think that this life, for all your efforts, will ever be anything other than the thing you truly are.’
Rosa is Rose, then, but Rosa is not Rose; Esther is Stein, but Esther is not Stein. The name change guards against any easy conflation, allowing the particular details of a historical life to undergo the alchemy of writing—to acquire significance and meaning beyond the limits of its inevitable mortality. It also sets off a chain of association: Rose, Rosa, Stein’s sister Rosa, the Roses’ beloved Rosa Luxemburg. Such associative proliferation feels particularly apt in the work of a writer so steeped in psychoanalytic thought, for whom association is itself a mode of meaning making. Clara, too, the name Jacqueline assigns to herself, carries its own resonances: most obviously, with Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg’s dearest friend and political comrade. The names, in other words, do not conceal so much as multiply the relations between one life and another; they do not fix the character’s identities so much as allow new associations to proliferate around them.
Rosa is and is not Rose. By the same token, might we even say: Rosa is Esther; Gillian Rose is Edith Stein? In her academic work, Gillian was fascinated by the philosophical potential of paradoxical sentences like these which assert something that both is and is not the case. She finds their origin in Hegel: his penchant for what he called ‘speculative propositions’, in which the word is does more than simply assert an identity between two terms but instead holds identity and difference together, setting the terms of the proposition into a relation through which each comes to acquire a meaning that it could not have had in isolation.
Something similar happens in Two Women. The novel does not simply tell us what Esther and Rosa or Stein and Rose have in common; rather, it entrusts the reader with the work of relating them, allowing each life to illuminate and refract the other. Esther is Rosa, but Esther is not Rosa; Stein is Rose, but Stein is not Rose. Their identities emerge in the space between resemblance and difference. It is another fruitful coincidence—or perhaps not a coincidence—that the Roses’ birth name was Stone: Stein in German. As Gillian puts it in Love’s Work, reflecting on the moment she legally changed her name from her birth father’s ‘Stone’ to her stepfather’s ‘Rose’: ‘The Name: the Name. A rose is (not) a rose is (not) a rose is (not) a rose,’ appropriating a line of poetry from Gertrude Stein and delighting in the coincidence of her name, too—‘Stein, a “Stone”, no less.’
Five months before her death, Gillian Rose delivered a lecture at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London reflecting on the writing process of her recently published Love’s Work. ‘I am not saying it [writing] lessens or abolishes suffering,’ she claimed. But it ‘definitely redeems… It feels like sharing sorrow with whoever will come later and read those words and understand.’ Rose knew at that point that she would ‘live before her time’, as she liked to put it, refusing the melancholic cliché of dying before one’s time—of imagining death as a mere interruption to a life that one is somehow owed. Writing Love’s Work offered Rose a means of doing so, of living before her time to come: ‘sharing sorrow’ across the boundary of death. Two Women, in its own way, is an enactment of the same redemption Gillian had found in writing. If Gillian, living before her time, wrote Love’s Work towards those who would come later—to future readers who might ‘share her sorrow’ and understand—in Two Women, Jacqueline, as one of those readers—and as her sister—writes back.
Note: A transcript of Rose’s lecture at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and Louis Klee’s essay on Gillian Rose and ‘the double novel’—referenced above—will be published in a forthcoming special issue of Critical Quarterly on ‘Gillian Rose & Literature’, edited by Louis Klee and Robert Lucas Scott.
