Two Women by Jacqueline Rose review – a memorial to Gillian Rose

The connections between the author’s sister and the German Jewish philosopher Edith Stein are vividly imagined in alternating chapters of a fictional biography

In a long and distinguished career as a feminist cultural critic, Jacqueline Rose has combined psychoanalysis, politics, human rights and literature in her work. Among her books are The Haunting of Sylvia Plath and Women in Dark Times, and a novel, 2001’s Albertine, focusing on Albertine Simonet, a character from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Her second novel, Two Women, similarly draws on biography and, in this case, memoir, to explore the lives of Edith Stein, the German Jewish philosopher turned Carmelite nun who was murdered in Auschwitz in 1942, and Gillian Rose, Jacqueline’s older sister, a sociologist and philosopher who died of ovarian cancer in 1995, aged just 48.

On her deathbed, Gillian converted from Judaism to the Anglican church, a journey outlined in her slim, elaborately erudite and gorgeously frank memoir, Love’s Work. The book gained cult and then classic status, and is probably better known than her radical philosophical works such as Hegel Contra Philosophy, although it is comparable to all her output as a manifesto on how to suffer and how to live. Like Stein, Gillian felt a deep frustration that her groundbreaking work as a philosopher would not be recognised in her lifetime. In the case of Stein, a phenomenologist who studied under Edmund Husserl and was doubly thwarted by being a woman and a Jew in Nazi Germany, posthumous ascendancy to sainthood took the place of professional accolades in life. She was canonised by Pope John Paul II in 1998. When she made her perpetual vows in 1938, a quote from St John of the Cross adorned Stein’s devotional

While grounded, intimate and relatable, there is also an element of the mystical in Gillian Rose’s memoir, and Rose goes some way towards beatifying her sister while working through the pain of loss. Impressively, if at times heavy-handedly, Two Women imagines an interconnection between Gillian and Stein in the form of a fictionalised chronological biography, alternating chapters of the two women’s lives. She begins with the sudden death of Stein’s timber merchant father near Breslau in 1893, when Edith, the youngest of 11 children, was two. From that point Edith’s redoubtable mother took charge of the family business, despite her now “vexed and flattened” world.

In the novel Edith is renamed Esther Felsenstein; Gillian is Rosa Edelblum, and her sister is Clara. Rosa and Clara grow up in a middle-class family in postwar west London with a younger half-sister. The children of a bitter divorce, and semi-estranged from their father, they take their stepfather’s surname. Born 20 months apart, Rosa seems always to have been the leader, the rebel: “for Rosa, childhood was an insult … a waiting room to a more intelligent world”.

In Breslau, Esther rejects the Judaism of her family for atheism in the same way that she turns away from marriage and motherhood. She breaks off her studies in 1915 to nurse for the Red Cross: “nothing could have prepared her for the human mind and body in their most raw, vulnerable, at moments, amoral state”. Each experience is a step toward the Catholicism she will eventually embrace.

While Rose’s depiction of Esther/Edith is deeply researched and visualised, her account of the close sisterhood of Rosa and Clara is of course the product of memory. There is a wonderful moment in which the two academic young women, “born mid-century, the offshoots of a genocide about which they were meant to know nothing”, contemplate their futures as they sit on an autumn lawn in the late 1960s at St Hilda’s, Oxford, the all-women college at which they have both ended up. Rosa in particular has escaped family strife and disapproval: but from this point “she would uncouple herself from disaster by staring it unblinking in the face”. In 1990, Gillian Rose was selected as a consultant on the Polish committee for the future of Auschwitz.

As war and antisemitic pogroms take hold, Esther does not flee. The mass roundup of Jews begins in mid 1941 and from then convents are emptied of any nun who is a convert from Judaism.Esther and her sister Rahel, who has followed her into the Catholic church, are sent by convoy to their fate one August morning: “towards God, Esther believed and prayed – they stepped one foot at a time into each other’s tread”. For the second set of sisters, once Rosa receives her terminal diagnosis, there is also very little time. Levity is almost entirely absent in this book – even an impromptu LSD trip in 1970s New York is treated with the utmost gravity. But we end with the pair, determinedly in high heels, on a final trip in France to see the famous sculpture of Christ carved over the tympanum of the basilica at Vézelay. “Clara had brought Rosa all this way as an act of love.” Ultimately Two Women is just that: an act of love, a memorial of faith.