Jacqueline Rose

Jacqueline Rose FBA FRSL
Born	1949 (age 75–76) London, England
Relatives	Gillian Rose (sister) Braham Murray (cousin)
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

Jacqueline Rose FBA FRSL (born 1949) is a British academic who is Professor of Humanities at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. ^[1] She is known for her work on the relationship between psychoanalysis, feminism and literature.

Education and career

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]

In 1991, Rose published The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, a critical study of the life and work of American poet Sylvia Plath. ^[12] The book "tore down the construction of Plath-as-icon, not least through the husbanding of her estate by her widower, Ted Hughes, and his sister, Olwyn". ^[12] In the book 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. ^[13]

In 2018, Rose published Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty. ^[12]

She was the judge of the Man Booker Prize in 2018. ^[12]

Rose has long been interested in Proust, who features in her 2011 non-fiction title Proust Among the Nations: From Dreyfus to the Middle East, as well as her only novel, Albertine. ^[12]

Criticism of Israel

Rose is highly critical of Zionism, describing it as "[having] been traumatic for the Jews as well as the Palestinians". ^[14] 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. ^[15]

In The Question of Zion ^[16] 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. ^[17]

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

Bibliography

• Lacan, Jacques (1985) [1982]. Mitchell, Juliet; Rose, Jacqueline (eds.). Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne . Translated by Jacqueline Rose. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN   9780393302110 – via Internet Archive.
• — (1993) [1984]. The Case of Peter Pan, or, The Impossibility of Children's Fiction . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN   0812214358.
• — (1986). Sexuality in the Field of Vision . London: Verso. ISBN   0860911489.
• — (1992) [1991]. The Haunting of Sylvia Plath . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN   0674382250. (new preface 1996)
• —, ed. (1993). Why War? Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Return to Melanie Klein. Oxford: B. Blackwell. ISBN   9780631189244.
• — (1996). "Feminine Sexuality". In Jackson, Stevi; Scott, Sue (eds.). Feminism and Sexuality: A Reader. New York: Columbia University Press. pp. 74–78. ISBN   9780231107082.
• — (1996). States of Fantasy . The Clarendon Lectures in English Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN   0198182805.
• — (2002) [2001]. Albertine (novel). London: Vintage Books. ISBN   0099286033. (first edn. London: Chatto & Windus, 2001, ISBN   0701169761)
• — (2003). On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World. London: Chatto & Windus. ISBN   9780701169770.
• — (2005). The Question of Zion . Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. ISBN   9780691130682.
• — (2007). The Last Resistance . London: Verso. ISBN   9781844671243.
• — (2011). Proust Among the Nations: From Dreyfus to the Middle East. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press. ISBN   9780226725789.
• — (2011). Godly kingship in Restoration England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN   9786613341983.
• — (2014). Women in Dark Times . London: Bloomsbury. ISBN   9781408845400.
• — (2018). Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN   9780571331437.
• — (2021). On Violence and on Violence Against Women. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN   9780571332717.
• — (2023). The Plague: Living Death in Our Times. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions. ISBN   9781804270486.

Personal life

Rose was born and grew up in Hayes in west London with her two sisters. ^{[4] [12]} 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] [12]} In 2012, her partner was the psychoanalyst Jonathan Sklar. ^[2]

She lives in North London. ^[12]

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. 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. 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. Rose, Jacqueline. "The child's text as mythology: a study of Peter Pan / Jacqueline Rose". Archived from the original on 21 August 2025.
6. "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. 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. Clark, Alex (28 July 2018). "Jacqueline Rose: 'I wanted to have a truer, more disturbing account of motherhood'". The Guardian. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 1 December 2025.
13. Moore, Thomas (12 September 2010), Mohammed Fairouz: An Interview, Opera Today. Retrieved 19 April 2011
14. 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.
15. Liu, Rebecca (5 June 2021). "Why Jacqueline Rose wants you to embrace the unknown". Prospect . Archived from the original on 14 July 2024.
16. Rose 2005, p. 116.
17. 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.

Further reading

• Naparstek, Ben; Clemens, Justin, eds. (2011). The Jacqueline Rose reader. Durham N.C.: Duke University Press. ISBN   9780822349631.

External links

• "Those opposing a cultural and academic boycott of Israel should examine the South African precedent, says Jacqueline Rose", openDemocracy, 4 September 2005. Rose's position on an academic and cultural boycott of Israel.
• "This land is your land", The Observer , 18 August 2002. Rose's views on the state of Israel.
• "What Zionism is Not, a review of The Question of Zion from a Zionist perspective", The Weekly Standard , 14 November 2005
• Interview, The Guardian , 4 January 2003
• "The Ideas Interview: Jacqueline Rose" – John Sutherland, The Guardian, 28 November 2005
• Israel and Resistance: an interview with Jacqueline Rose, State of Nature, Winter 2008
• Video: Jacqueline Rose chairing a discussion with Avi Shlaim and Shlomo Sand at the Frontline Club, London, 12 November 2009