Jacqueline Rose's new novel Two Women sets her late sister beside a Carmelite nun

Jacqueline Rose's second novel, Two Women, follows two real lives: the German philosopher Edith Stein and Rose's own older sister, Gillian. Fitzcarraldo Editions published the book on 5 November 2026, and the Guardian reviewed it on 9 November, under a headline calling it a memorial to Gillian Rose.

Edith Stein was a German Jewish philosopher who studied under Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, a school of thought about how people experience the world. She later became a Carmelite nun, a member of a enclosed Catholic religious order. She was murdered in Auschwitz in 1942. Pope John Paul II declared her a saint in 1998, a process known as canonisation.

Gillian Rose was a sociologist and philosopher. She died of ovarian cancer in 1995, at the age of 48. Late in life she left Judaism and joined the Anglican church, converting on her deathbed.

The two sisters were students at the same college. Both attended St Hilda's College, Oxford, where Gillian studied philosophy and Jacqueline studied English, according to a 2012 Guardian profile.

In the novel, Edith becomes Esther Felsenstein and Gillian becomes Rosa Edelblum. The names change, but the book keeps the outline of the two women's lives in view. Stein's path from a university seminar room to a convent is the story's spine, and Gillian's life and death run alongside it.

Rose is already known for nonfiction. She wrote The Haunting of Sylvia Plath and Women in Dark Times. Her 2001 novel, Albertine, took up Albertine Simonet, a character in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and gave her a voice of her own. Two Women is her second novel.

For readers who want the physical book, Fitzcarraldo's edition runs to 332 pages. It is a paperback with flaps, the folded inside edges of the cover that hold the jacket neatly around the text. The flaps can also carry a short description or a note about the author, which many readers use as a first look before buying.

Stein and Gillian Rose are an unusual pairing. One was a nun who died in a Nazi camp. The other died of cancer in a London hospital. Rose's book sets them side by side, and the Guardian's review treats that pairing as the heart of the work.

What happens next is a matter for the readers who pick it up. Each reader will bring their own view of the two women, and of the way Rose has put them on the same page.