Jacqueline Rose

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Jacqueline Rose
Born1949 (age 7576)
London, England
Relatives
Academic background
Education St Hilda's College, Oxford
Sorbonne, Paris
University College London
Thesis The Child's Text as Mythology: A Study of Peter Pan (1979)
Doctoral advisor Frank Kermode

Rose graduated from St Hilda's College, Oxford, where she studied English. She gained her higher degree ( maîtrise ) in comparative literature from the Sorbonne, Paris, where she was influenced by Julia Kristeva, became interested in Sigmund Freud, worked at Yves Saint Laurent and began her doctoral research on children's literature. [2] [3] [4] She took her doctorate in 1979 from the University of London, University College (by the time of her graduation renamed to University College London), where she was supervised by Frank Kermode. [2] [5]

She was a lecturer, then reader in English at the School for Global Studies, [a] University of Sussex, from 1976 to 1991, [6] and taught a women's writing course there in the 1980s. [2] In 1992, she took up an appointment as professor of English at Queen Mary & Westfield College (from 2000 Queen Mary University of London) and worked there until 2015, when she became a professor of humanities at Birkbeck, University of London. [6]

Rose is a broadcaster and contributor to the London Review of Books since 1995. [7] [8]

In 2006, Rose was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, [6] and in 2022, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. [9]

As of 2023, she was a co-director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. [10]

Work

Rose's book Albertine , a novel from 2001, is a feminist variation on Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu . [11]

Rose is best known for her critical study on the life and work of American poet Sylvia Plath, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, published in 1991. In the book, Rose offers a postmodernist feminist interpretation of Plath's work, and criticises Plath's husband Ted Hughes and other editors of Plath's writing. Rose describes the hostility she experienced from Hughes and his sister (who acts as literary executor to Plath's estate) including threats received from Hughes about some of Rose's analysis of Plath's poem "The Rabbit Catcher". The Haunting of Sylvia Plath was critically acclaimed, and itself subject to a famous critique by Janet Malcolm in her book The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.[ citation needed ]

Rose's States of Fantasy (1996) was the inspiration for composer Mohammed Fairouz's Double Concerto of the same title. [12]

Criticism of Israel

Rose is highly critical of Zionism, describing it as "[having] been traumatic for the Jews as well as the Palestinians". [13] In the same interview, Rose points to the internal critique of Zionism expressed by Martin Buber and Ahad Ha'am.

She describes her visit to Palestinian refugee camps in Ramallah in the 1980s as having provided her with a political education. [14]

In The Question of Zion [15] Rose argued that Israel is responsible for "some of the worst cruelties of the modern nation-state". Israeli historian Alexander Yakobson described this as "moralizing" and disconnected from historical reality. [16]

In 2007, she was involved in establishing the Independent Jewish Voices. [2]

Bibliography

Personal life

She spent her early years in Hayes in west London. [4] Her elder sister was the philosopher Gillian Rose, and she is a cousin of the theatre director Braham Murray. [10] Her father, a doctor, arrived in the United Kingdom from a prisoner-of-war camp where he had suffered torture; he and her mother, who was prevented by her family from attending medical school, divorced when Rose was three. Rose grew up with her stepfather, who also had a surgical practice, and whose surname she took along with her sister. [4] Some fifty members of her mother's family, the Prevezers, had been murdered by the Nazis in the Chełmno extermination camp in central Poland. [4] [2]

She befriended fellow feminists Juliet Mitchell, Laura Mulvey, and Sally Alexander during her PhD years at UCL. [4]

In the 1990s Rose was in a relationship with the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, with whom she adopted a Chinese-born daughter, Mia, in 1995. [2] [4] In 2012, her partner was the psychoanalyst Jonathan Sklar. [2]

Notes

  1. According to an interview with Rose, at the School of Cultural and Community Studies. [4]

References

  1. "Our Staff", Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. Retrieved 23 November 2014.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Jeffries, Stuart (3 February 2012). "Jacqueline Rose: a life in writing". The Guardian . Retrieved 5 August 2021.
  3. Rose, Jacqueline (22 July 2021), "The Power of Questions", The New York Review of Books , interviewed by Smallwood, Christine, archived from the original on 2 July 2021
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Rose, Jacqueline (14 August 2023). "How the Writer and Critic Jacqueline Rose Puts the World on the Couch". The New Yorker . Interviewed by Sehgal, Parul. Archived from the original on 14 August 2023.
  5. "The child's text as mythology: a study of Peter Pan / Jacqueline Rose". Archived from the original on 21 August 2025.
  6. 1 2 3 "Professor Jacqueline Rose FBA". British Academy . Archived from the original on 16 June 2025. Retrieved 21 August 2025.
  7. "Jacqueline Rose". London Review of Books . Retrieved 21 August 2025.
  8. "Jacqueline Rose". London Review of Books . Archived from the original on 8 June 2010.
  9. Wild, Stephi (12 July 2022). "RSL Announces 60 New Fellows and Honorary Fellows For 2022". BroadwayWorld . Retrieved 31 March 2023.
  10. 1 2 Rose, Jacqueline (6 May 2023), "The Superego of the Magazines", The New York Review of Books , interviewed by Needleman, Sam, archived from the original on 6 May 2023
  11. "Who's that girl?: Alex Clark finds, in Jacqueline Rose's Albertine, a richly suggestive and provocative voice for Proust's heroine," Alex Clark, The Guardian , 27 October 2001. Retrieved 8 June 2010.
  12. Moore, Thomas (12 September 2010), Mohammed Fairouz: An Interview, Opera Today. Retrieved 19 April 2011
  13. Rosemary Bechler (17 August 2005). "Nation as trauma, Zionism as question: Jacqueline Rose interviewed". openDemocracy . Archived from the original on 14 January 2008. Retrieved 23 July 2006.
  14. Liu, Rebecca (5 June 2021). "Why Jacqueline Rose wants you to embrace the unknown". Prospect . Archived from the original on 14 July 2024.
  15. Rose 2005, p. 116.
  16. Alexander Yakobson (2008). "'The Joy of Moral Preaching', Review of: Jacqueline Rose, The Question of Zion, Hebrew translation by Oded Wolkstein" (PDF). Katharsis . 9. Translated by Sara Halper (from the original Hebrew): 18–50. Retrieved 2 March 2024 via Jewish Ideas Daily.