'Reading On Not Being Able to Sleep is like being at a high altitude... the view is dazzling... [A] marvellous, exacting book' - Observer

In these powerful essays Jacqueline Rose delves into the questions that keep us awake at night, into issues of privacy and publishing, exposure and shame. Do some women writers - Christina Rossetti, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath - have a special talent for self-revelation? Or are they simply more vulnerable to the invasions of biography?

Turning to psychoanalysis, Rose explores its affinity with modernism and asks what it can tell us about the limits of knowledge, both about the most intimate and baffling components of experience and about the furthest, hallucinatory, reaches of the mind.

These fine studies move deftly between public, political and private, unconscious worlds. Offering new links between feminism, psychoanalysis, literature and politics, On Not Being Able to Sleep provides a resonant and thought provoking collection for the present day.

"Rose puts good questions to the human psyche... in a book about the limits of language, Rose succeeds in showing the fullness and strength of the questions it can be made to ask" - Independent on Sunday

"This collection should appeal both to the 'common reader' and those more academically inclined- the writing here is never less than excellent" - Scotland on Sunday

"Rose's thought is so subtle and sophisticated" - Literary Review

"[Rose] displays wonderful clarity and originality" - Daily Telegraph