title: Love's Work (New York Review Books Classics)
author: Gillian Rose
description: This beautiful memoir comes right from a genuinely thoughtful heart. It is good to find that philosophizing can offer its age-old consolations so present tensely.<br /> Elisabeth Young-Bruehl<br /><br /> In its emphasis on the work of living, suffering, and loving, this is a masterpiece of the autobiographers art, intense and rationally decorous at the same time.<br /> Edward Said<br /><br />This is not a pastel reverie, but a work in which the author, an English philosopher, feminist, and Marxist, not only bares her soul but carefully dissects itRose develops by contrast her notion of love's work: the obligation to go on thinking and caring in spite of the certainty of physical and moral defeat. Gillian Rose died shortly after completing this rigorous and lyrical book. <i>The Boston Review</i><br /><br />Powerfula miracle. <i>The New York Times Book Review</i><br /><br />Intriguing. <i>Boston Globe</i><br /><br />Sears the page it occupies. <i>Philadelphia Inquirer</i><br /><br />Extraordinary. <i>Mirabella</i><br /><br />An autobiography of astonishing elegance and concision, it is also deeply lyrical; a love song and a work song. Michael Wood<br /><br />This beautiful memoir comes right from a genuinely thoughtful heart. It is good to find that philosophizing can offer its age-old consolations so present tensely. Elisabeth Young Bruehl<br /><br />In its emphasis on the work of living, suffering, and loving, this is a masterpiece of the autobiographers art, intense and rationally decorous at the same time. Edward Said<br /><br />MagnificentMakes whatever else has been written on the deepest issues of human life by the philosophers of our time seem intolerably abstract and even frivolous. Arthur Danto<br /><br />This small book contains multitudes...It provokes, inspires, and illuminates more profoundly than many a bulky volume, and it delivers what its title promises, a new allegory about love. Marina Warner, <i>London Review of Books</i><br /><br />Heartrendingly beautiful. <i>The Times</i> (London)<br /><br />A poetic and highly intellectual memoir that encourages us to read the mare's nest of grotesqueries that is our world of pain, illness, and trauma as a birthing-ground for the complex beauty of human relationships. <i>Kirkus Reviews</i><br /><br /> In a memoir by turns brilliant and exasperating, Rose...travels between the adjoining territories of love and death after being diagnosed with-and receiving brutal and ambiguously effective treatment for-abdominal cancer...It cuts to the quick. <i>Publishers Weekly </i><br /><br /> Part intellectual coming-of-age tale and part spiritual memoir, Rose's search for the soul takes her on a wildly dizzying ride through despair and hope, sickness and healing, love and death. <i>Library Journal<br /><br />I struggle to think of a finer, more rewarding short autobiography than this. Gillian Rose, professor of social and political thought at Warwick University, and dying of cancer at the age of 48, managed to complete and publish this before her time was up.  Nicholas Lezard, <i>The Guardian</i><br /></i>
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  Published in Great Britain in 2017 by
  
  Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
  
  [www.canongate.co.uk](http://www.canongate.co.uk)
  
  This digital edition first published in 2017 by Canongate Books
  
  Copyright © Matt Haig, 2017
  
  The moral right of the author has been asserted
  
  While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material
  reproduced herein, the publishers would like to apologise for any omissions
  and will be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in any further
  editions.
  
   _British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data_
  
  A catalogue record for this book is available on
  
  request from the British Library
  
  ISBN 978 1 78211 863 3
  
  Typeset by Biblichor Ltd, Edinburgh
  
  For Andrea
  
  I often think of what Hendrich said to me, over a century ago, in his New York
  apartment.
  
  ‘The first rule is that you don’t fall in love,’ he said. ‘There are other
  rules too, but that is the main one. No falling in love. No sta