Women in Dark Times

‘A surfeit of elegance and intelligence.’
— Ali Smith

‘A rigorously argued and at times breathtaking book. Many paragraphs contain a controlled explosion; her analysis of men’s fear of and fascination with female sexuality, born from the boy’s early proximity to the mother’s body, is one of them. The book closes with a clarion cry: “Women have been reasonable for far too.” Her reasoning, ironically, is as tight and sinuous as a constrictor knot. It is a time to be afraid of the dark.’
— Frances Wilson, Telegraph

‘Rose confronts dark times with dark and moving stories from the last century inspiring a new feminism for this one. By so doing she keeps alive the dreams of so many women from Rosa Luxemburg and Marilyn Monroe to young girls killed in the name of some perverted sense of “honour”. Most likely a classic.’
— Shami Chakrabarti

‘It’s really hard for me to overestimate how important [Rose’s] work has been for me... I don’t feel like that about very many writers.’
— Maggie Nelson

‘Jacqueline Rose has no peer among critics of her generation. The brilliance of her literary insight, the lucidity of her prose, and the subtlety of her analyses are simply breathtaking.’
— Edward Said

‘One of the most original and intellectually sophisticated minds at work today.’
— Eimear McBride

‘To read Rose is to understand that there is no border between us and the world; it is an invitation to a radical kind of responsibility.’
— Parul Sehgal, New York Times

‘As a literary scholar and psychoanalytic thinker, Rose has long insisted that we pay close attention to the subterranean fears, fantasies, and narratives that structure our most pressing sociopolitical problems.’
— Merve Emre, The Nation