Presence of Mind

How the critic Jacqueline Rose learned to read the world

- By Parul Sehgal. Photograph by Robbie Lawrence

We were too late. For weeks, the Davidia—the ghost trees—had been shedding their loose white blooms, like translucent handkerchiefs. Jacqueline Rose pocketed them on her walks around her London neighborhood of West Hampstead—the kind of long, looping tour she had begun taking daily during the pandemic. She brought me on one such walk, late this spring, but the specimens we found were sad: squashed, yellowing smudges. “About two weeks late,” she assessed, studying them. Never mind. There was a handsome lime tree to admire. There was a florist to avoid (“racist”) and a florist to visit. We lingered over shaggy mums and reluctant new lilies, bound tight in their buds. Groups of shouting boys ran by in ghastly magenta school blazers. “Who designed the jackets?” I wondered.

“Who designed the boys?” she replied.

Rose, who co-directs the Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London, is a feminist writer and critic with a psychoanalytic orientation; she is singularly influential, both within and without the academy. Since the nineteen-eighties, she has explored a range of topics—modernism, motherhood, the Middle East. But mourning has long been a keynote in her work, nowhere more emphatically than in her new book, “The Plague: Living Death in Our Times.” A collection of essays incubated during the COVID lockdown and structured around readings of Albert Camus, Sigmund Freud, and Simone Weil, it is perhaps her most scarred and harrowed volume and yet one strangely energized, full of possibility.