I n 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 .…