Love’s Work

Back of the Book

Love’s Work is at once a memoir and a work of philosophy. Written by the English philosopher Gillian Rose as she was dying of cancer, it is a book about both the fallibility and the endurance of love, love that becomes real and lasting through an ongoing reckoning with its own limitations. Rose looks back on her childhood, the complications of her parents’ divorce and her dyslexia, and her deep and divided feelings about what it means to be Jewish. She tells the stories of several friends also laboring under the sentence of death. From the sometimes conflicting vantage points of her own and her friends’ tales, she seeks to work out (seeks, because the work can never be complete—to be alive means to be incomplete) a distinctive outlook on life, one that will do justice to our yearning both for autonomy and for connection to others. With droll self-knowledge (“I am highly qualified in unhappy love affairs,” Rose writes, “My earliest unhappy love affair was with Roy Rogers”) and with unsettling wisdom (“To live, to love, is to be failed”), Rose has written a beautiful, tender, tough, and intricately wrought survival kit packed with necessary but unanswerable questions.

Why You Should Read It

Rose’s exacting prose and close, sometimes ugly examination of people she has lost or whose love she must sacrifice—at the impartial hands of death, disengagement from what she calls her love’s work, or their own mistakes—introduces to her readers a mode of being that wills forth a revelatory scope of love and its inner workings. By not shying away from the painful or grotesque, but lingering, following a thread of representations that become true to life, we might begin to believe that we can reason with the whims of fate and the people at whose mercy we, like Rose, find ourselves. Upon reading, a fundamental fear is triggered: Will our love survive such unequivocal examination? It must. And we must forge on, making sense of ourselves through a full spectrum of relationships, while we, battle-weary, continue to do love’s work.

Memorable Passage

Subsequently I found myself in a routinely tedious faculty meeting, in which, as usual, I carried no presence whatsoever. As drivers insist that the blaring radio aids their concentration on the road, I always found that a volume open on my lap enabled me to pay the small amount of attention needed to navigate these shallows. When asked with withering detection by the impassive secretary whether the book I was blatantly perusing was good, I nonchalantly replied, ‘I only read good books.’ I responded similarly to her policing my familiar to send a note of apology for a meeting that I actually managed to miss, ‘But I’m not sorry.’

About the Author

Gillian Rose (1947–1995) was a British philosopher, social theorist, and cultural critic whose intellectual contributions have left a lasting impact on the fields of philosophy, political thought, and urban studies. Born into a working-class Jewish family, Rose's journey from a troubled childhood to becoming a prominent scholar is a testament to her resilience and intellectual prowess. Her influential works include Hegel Contra Sociology, where she engaged with the philosophical writings of Hegel to critique contemporary sociological thought. As a professor at the University of Warwick, Rose became a leading figure in critical theory and feminist philosophy. Beyond academia, she wrote accessibly for broader audiences, contributing to public discourse on topics ranging from architecture to religion. Rose is worth knowing for her interdisciplinary approach, her commitment to intellectual rigor, and her transformative impact on the understanding of space, power, and human subjectivity within modern society.

Further Reading

“Love's Work: Gillian Rose's Fiercely Forthright Life Force” by Lindesay Irvine, The Guardian