The connections between the author’s sister and the German Jewish philosopher Edith Stein are vividly imagined in alternating chapters of a fictional biography
In a long and distinguished career as a feminist cultural critic, Jacqueline Rose has combined psychoanalysis, politics, human rights and literature in her work. Among her books are The Haunting of Sylvia Plath and Women in Dark Times, and a novel, 2001’s Albertine, focusing on Albertine Simonet, a character from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Her second novel, Two Women, similarly draws on biography and, in this case, memoir, to explore the lives of Edith Stein, the German Jewish philosopher turned Carmelite nun who was murdered in Auschwitz in 1942, and Gillian Rose, Jacqueline’s older sister, a sociologist and philosopher who died of ovarian cancer in 1995, aged just 48.
On her deathbed, Gillian converted from Judaism to the Anglican church, a journey outlined in her slim, elaborately erudite and gorgeously frank memoir, Love’s Work. The book gained cult and then classic status, and is probably better known than her radical philosophical works such as Hegel Contra Philosophy, although it is comparable to all her output as a manifesto on how to suffer and how to live. Like Stein, Gillian felt a deep frustration that her groundbreaking work as a philosopher would not be recognised in her lifetime. In the case of Stein, a phenomenologist who studied under Edmund Husserl and was doubly thwarted by being a woman and a Jew in Nazi Germany, posthumous ascendancy to sainthood took the place of professional accolades in life. She was canonised by Pope John Paul II in 1998. When she made her perpetual vows in 1938, a quote from St John of the Cross adorned Stein’s devotional picture: “Henceforth my only vocation is to love.”