The person who emerges in this brief autobiography is fierce, difficult, vulnerable, and unrelenting in her will to hope and in her devotion to what she calls “the shared cares of the finite world.” When she writes, thinking of Proust (“les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu’on a perdus”), that “the only paradises cannot be those that are lost but those that are unlocked as a result of coercion, reluctance, cajolery and humiliation,” she is saying paradise is not a gift or an effect of grace but the end of a plan of work, and although no one works to get into an inferno, one might need to stay there for some time to perform various necessary labors.

Rose’s epigraph to Love’s Work—“Keep your mind in hell, and despair not”—is taken from the sayings of the Russian monk Staretz Silouan, and is glossed several times within the text. There is, for example, “the unhappiness of one who refuses to dwell in hell, and who lives, therefore, in the most static despair.” There is the moment when Rose describes herself as unhappy in love and refusing all consolation, including “the endlessly inventive love of my sisters.” “Keep your mind in hell and...” she says, without completing the sentence. Alternative healing, with what Rose regards as its fake spirituality, is said to offer a “counsel of despair which would keep the mind out of hell.”