Women In Dark Times

Women in Dark Times begins with three remarkable women: revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg; German-Jewish painter Charlotte Salomon; and film icon Marilyn Monroe. The story of these women, bound together by their struggles against iniquity, blazes a trail across some of the defining features of the twentieth century – revolution, totalitarianism and the American dream – and compels us to reckon with the unspeakable. Bringing to the surface the subterranean depths of history and the human mind that dominant political vocabularies cannot bear to face, pioneering critic and public intellectual Jacqueline Rose forges a new language for feminism. Extending her argument into the present, Rose turns her focus to ‘honour’ killings and celebrates contemporary artists whose work grows out of an unflinching engagement with all that is darkest in the modern world. Women in Dark Times, reissued a decade after its original publication, offers a template for a scandalous feminism, one which confronts all that is most recalcitrant and unsettling in the struggle to create a better world.

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

‘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

‘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