Jacqueline Rose (born 1949 in London) is a British academic who is Professor of Humanities at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.

Life and work

Jacqueline Rose is known for her work on the relationship between psychoanalysis, feminism and literature. She is a graduate of St Hilda's College, Oxford, and gained her higher degree (maîtrise) from the Sorbonne, Paris. She took her doctorate from the University of London, where she was supervised by Frank Kermode. Her elder sister was the philosopher Gillian Rose. Rose's book Albertine, a novel from 2001, is a feminist variation on Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. Rose is best known for her critical study on the life and work of American poet Sylvia Plath, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, published in 1991. In the book, Rose offers a postmodernist feminist interpretation of Plath's work, and criticises Plath's husband Ted Hughes and other editors of Plath's writing. Rose is a broadcaster and contributor to the London Review of Books. Rose's States of Fantasy (1996) was the inspiration for composer Mohammed Fairouz's Double Concerto of the same title. In 2022, Rose was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Criticism of Israel

Rose is highly critical of Zionism, describing it as "[having] been traumatic for the Jews as well as the Palestinians". In the same interview, Rose points to the internal critique of Zionism expressed by Martin Buber and Ahad Ha'am. Rose's claim in The Question of Zion that Israel is responsible for "some of the worst cruelties of the modern nation-state" has been questioned as disconnected from historical reality and been characterised instead as "moralizing" by the Israeli historian Alexander Yakobson in the Hebrew periodical Katharsis.