Jacqueline Rose

Jacqueline Rose (born 1949) is a British academic who is a professor and co-director at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. She is known for her work on the relationship between psychoanalysis, feminism, and literature. In July 2026, she was announced as winner of the PEN Pinter Prize, awarded annually by English PEN.

Early life and education

Rose was born and grew up in Hayes in west London with her two sisters. Her elder sister was the philosopher Gillian Rose, She received her doctorate in 1979 from the University College London (UCL), where she was supervised by Frank Kermode. She befriended Juliet Mitchell, Laura Mulvey, and Sally Alexander during her PhD years at UCL. and taught a women's writing course there in the 1980s.

In 2006, Rose was elected a Fellow of the British Academy,

As of 2023, she was a co-director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.

Work

Rose's book Albertine (2001) is a feminist parallel novel to Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu.

In 1991, Rose published The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, a critical study of the life and work of American poet Sylvia Plath. The book "tore down the construction of Plath-as-icon, not least through the husbanding of her estate by her widower, Ted Hughes, and his sister, Olwyn." The Haunting of Sylvia Plath gained Rose wider attention and was influential in studies of Plath, and itself subject to a critique by Janet Malcolm in her book The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.

Rose's States of Fantasy (1996) was the inspiration for composer Mohammed Fairouz's Double Concerto of the same name.

She published The Last Resistance in 2008.

She has written about Marcel Proust both in her 2011 non-fiction title, Proust Among the Nations: From Dreyfus to the Middle East, as well as in her only novel, Albertine (2001). She describes her visit to Palestinian refugee camps in Ramallah in the 1980s as having provided her with a political education.

In The Question of Zion (2005), Rose argues that Israel is responsible for "some of the worst cruelties of the modern nation-state". Israeli historian Alexander Yakobson describes this as "moralizing" and disconnected from historical reality. However, Australian academic Dennis Altman describes the book as demonstrating "thorough knowledge of the founders of Israel and their early critics" and complementing this with interviews with contemporary Israelis. Columnist Rafael Behr wrote that her analysis "stands on a solid edifice of scholarship".

She is a supporter of the cultural boycott of Israel. In 2007, she was involved in establishing Independent Jewish Voices.