Love's Work

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 <i>Dialectic of Nihilism</i> <i>The Broken Middle</i> <i>Judaism and Modernity</i> and <i>Hegel</i>. She died in December 1995. <p>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 written with moments of surprising humour and often exhilarating <i>Love's Work</i> is the result.<br><br>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.<br><br>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') <i>Love's Work</i> asks the unanswerable question: how is a life best lived?</p> <b>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</b> <b>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</b> <b>Powerful...a miracle</b> <b>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</b> <b>The philosopher's laconic lyrical memoir displays an unsettling yet wholly inspirational vigour in the face of life-threatening disease</b> <b>Sears the page it occupies</b> <b>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</b> <b>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</b> <b>Extraordinarily beautiful</b> <b>An autobiographical narrative of astonishing power which intertwines threads of philosophy and personal life</b> <b>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</b> <b>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</b> <b>Exquisite</b> <b>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</b> <b>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</b> <b>Magnetic - elegant unflinching irreverent and ferociously principled in its discussion of desire and affliction</b>