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
Academic work
School or tradition	Lacanianism
Institutions	University of Sussex (1976–1991) Queen Mary University of London (1992–2015) Birkbeck, University of London (since 2015)
Main interests	The relationship between psychoanalysis, feminism and literature
Notable works	The Haunting of Sylvia Plath

Jacqueline Rose FBA FRSL (born 1949) is a British academic who is Professor of Humanities at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. 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. 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.

She was a lecturer, then reader in English at the School for Global Studies, University of Sussex, from 1976 to 1991, and taught a women's writing course there in the 1980s. 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.

Rose is a broadcaster and contributor to the London Review of Books since 1995.

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

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

Work

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

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.

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

Criticism of Israel

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

In The Question of Zion 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.

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

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

She spent her early years in Hayes in west London. Her elder sister was the philosopher Gillian Rose, and she is a cousin of the theatre director Braham Murray. 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. Some fifty members of her mother's family, the Prevezers, had been murdered by the Nazis in the Chełmno extermination camp in central Poland.

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

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

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