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We were too late. For weeks, the Davidia—the ghost trees—had been shedding their loose white blooms, like translucent handkerchiefs. Jacqueline Rose pocketed them on her walks around her London neighborhood of West Hampstead—the kind of long, looping tour she had begun taking daily during the pandemic. She brought me on one such walk, late this spring, but the specimens we found were sad: squashed, yellowing smudges. “About two weeks late,” she assessed, studying them. Never mind. There was a handsome lime tree to admire. There was a florist to avoid (“racist”) and a florist to visit. We lingered over shaggy mums and reluctant new lilies, bound tight in their buds. Groups of shouting boys ran by in ghastly magenta school blazers. “Who designed the jackets?” I wondered.
“Who designed the boys?” she replied.
Rose, who co-directs the Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London, is a feminist writer and critic with a psychoanalytic orientation; she is singularly influential, both within and without the academy. Since the nineteen-eighties, she has explored a range of topics—modernism, motherhood, the Middle East. But mourning has long been a keynote in her work, nowhere more emphatically than in her new book, “The Plague: Living Death in Our Times.” A collection of essays incubated during the COVID lockdown and structured around readings of Albert Camus, Sigmund Freud, and Simone Weil, it is perhaps her most scarred and harrowed volume and yet one strangely energized, full of possibility.
It is also, in Rose’s elliptical way, full of her sister, Gillian Rose, a philosopher who died of ovarian cancer in 1995, when she was forty-eight and Jacqueline was forty-six. Growing up in London, they were the doctor’s girls, the clever girls, from a middle-class Jewish family in a working-class neighborhood. Their stepfather—their parents divorced when Jacqueline was three, and their mother remarried soon afterward—kept a surgical practice on the ground floor of their house. Domestic life was quiet, organized around the doctor’s work, the children’s education, and a thicket of family secrets. Out of the silence, the sisters would produce shelves of books between them—consumed with naming the unnameable, with writing into the dark.
“We spurred each other on,” Rose told me. She paused. “I hope I said ‘spurred.’ If I said ‘spurned,’ that’s also quite interesting. I think both are true.”
Rose’s work has been full of haunting. “Haunting, or being haunted, might indeed be another word for writing,” she noted in her essay collection “On Not Being Able to Sleep” (2003). She first came to broad attention with “The Haunting of Sylvia Plath” (1991), a feminist reading of the poet that refused to reduce her to a bundle of symptoms or to mine the poems for biography. Rose insisted on the violent, emancipating breadth of Plath’s imagination, and turned the distorting fantasies projected on her poetry back on the reader. She went on to take this approach to studying women as varied as Marilyn Monroe and Rosa Luxemburg (“Women in Dark Times” was the title of her 2014 essay collection), tracing overlooked acts of creative defiance.
“I fell in love with these women—the links between their internal abjection and political insight,” she told me. Never shying from trouble, she tussled with Plath’s estate, and, many people said, put Israel itself on the analyst’s couch, in her 2005 book “The Question of Zion.” In Rose’s view, nobody is innocent, and the work of mourning is never completed.
On our walk, she wore a buttery leather jacket and exuded a careful, coaxing charm. At times, she played the analyst, guiding the analysand toward insights but taking care not to preëmpt them. Lacan said that analysis did not take place in the present tense but in the future perfect—a way of looking back at what one will have become—and it is here that Rose seemed to dwell during our time together. “You’ll want to tease this out,” she would note, of a particular detail. Or, “There’s a whole other story there, which I think is crucial for you.” Holding up her finger, with its bright-blue polish: “Now, this is something you can use.”
I became accustomed to her swift assessments, to her eerie bodily attunement: “You’re jet-lagged. You will need to sleep. Go home but don’t sleep just yet, stay awake.” Before parting on one occasion, she scanned me quickly: “If you’ll want the ladies, it’s to your right. Never a bad idea.” She wore Bakelite bangles and the same necklace every time we met, a string of alternating opaque and transparent beads. It was, I learned, her pattern.
Psychoanalysis, for Rose, begins with “a mind in flight,” fleeing its own pain and obscuring its meanings by projection, displacement, inversion. As we walked, the ground beneath her feet seemed thick with the detritus of memory. “All the long gone darlings,” Plath called her dead. “They / Get back, though, soon, / Soon.” Rose mentioned Gillian almost as soon as we met, and Gillian was swiftly joined by two other figures: her cousin and lifelong “spiritual companion,” Braham Murray, who died five years ago, and her friend Edward Said, who died fifteen years before that. (Rose does an excellent impression of him: “You’ve got to write every day, Jacqueline.”) These were, she said, choosing her words carefully, “the losses that define one.”
West Hampstead is bustling, affluent; we were far from the neighborhood of Rose’s childhood. Born in 1949, she grew up in the West London town of Hayes, bordered by factories filled with the migrants of the nineteen-fifties. She recalled mothers warning their children, “ ‘When those Pakis come at you in their bands along the street, just cross over to the other side. Dirty Pakis.’ I would go home, and my stepfather would say, ‘I’ve been in working-class houses, and I’ve been in Asian houses, and, believe you me, the least dirty in the town are the Asians.’ He was really anti-racist, as was my mother.” Still, the children didn’t mix with their neighbors. “I’d walk into the grocery store and ask for ‘small, firm tomatoes,’ as if somehow being the doctor’s daughter entitled me to the best tomato.” The creeping understanding of her privilege, she said, was accompanied by a creeping awareness of unmentionable suffering in the family’s past.
Every Sunday saw the dreaded trip to the maternal grandparents, the Prevezers, immigrants from Poland, and each a remnant of slaughtered families. Fifty of her grandmother’s relatives had been killed in the Holocaust, Gillian once wrote. This was never discussed; all that was communicated was a hatred of Germans and a desperate cleaving to tradition. “They were cauldrons of feeling, but none of it could be expressed,” Braham Murray, who became a celebrated theatre director, wrote in his memoir, “The Worst It Can Be Is a Disaster.” The fact that “no Prevezer could ever appear vulnerable or moved” was, he said, the family “curse.”
The grandparents had made their way in London by waiting outside stocking factories, collecting the rejects, matching up pairs, then selling them off a cart in the East End. In time, they set up their own hosiery shop. Rose’s mother had secured a place at medical school, but her parents refused to let her attend. She was married off to a doctor fourteen years her senior who had recently returned from a prisoner-of-war camp, where he had been tortured. In Rose’s delicate assessment, he “was not ready to be married.”
Two daughters were born soon afterward: Gillian in the fall of 1947, and Jacqueline twenty months later. Gillian was the serious one, Rose said: “She was reading Plato while I was sitting on a swing, listening to pop music, thinking about looking pretty, and boys.” Rose told me that the great wish of her childhood was to best her “serious, pained” sister; it was “a productive rivalry.”
Their parents’ divorce was bitter and protracted, with frequent custody challenges. Gillian, in her memoir, “Love’s Work,” recalled that she would vomit with dread before the fortnightly visit with their grim-faced father. Both parents remarried, had other children. At sixteen, Gillian formally changed her surname to that of her “kind, equanimous, humorous” stepfather, becoming a Rose in a defiant act of self-assertion that she compared to a bat mitzvah. (Jacqueline, of course, would do the same.) Then Rose’s mother left her second husband—another painful divorce. Rose was in a gap year after secondary school; Gillian, in her first term at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford. “My mother had given up too much,” Rose told me. “She needed to live some more.”
Gillian was less forgiving, and her fury at her parents still scorches in the memoir; her upbringing, she wrote, “ruined my capacity to tolerate highly charged yet contrary emotions about the same person.” Rose, for her part, tries to maintain a gentle, rotating sense of sympathy for all the players in a drama. She says that her mother “had a case for rage” against her own parents, who had denied her an education. “But there was no empathy. And no historical understanding. And, above all, no real telling of the story.”
Rose herself is not a voluble teller of such stories. Janet Malcolm, in her book about Sylvia Plath, “The Silent Woman,” describes meeting Rose and offers up a grudging piece of praise: “Her manner was engaging—neither too friendly nor too distant—and on a scale of how people should conduct themselves with journalists I would give her a score of 99.” Rose, Malcolm thought, had “carefully worked out for herself exactly how much she had to give.” The Rose I met was equally circumspect, cordoning off large portions of her family history and of her personal life. But, even as she declined to provide certain details, she offhandedly pointed me to those people who would provide them—to family members, or their memoirs. This constitutionally guarded and private person has chosen to surround herself with provocatively candid intimates.
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