Love's Work

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 and written with moments of surprising humour, Love's Work is the exhilarating result.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.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'), Love's Work asks the unanswerable question: how is a life best lived?

Powerful...a miracle, 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, Extraordinarily beautiful, 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, 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

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 Dialectic of Nihilism, The Broken Middle, Judaism and Modernity and Hegel. She died in December 1995.