Jacqueline Rose, 10 July 2025
“... Rereading the work of the pioneering feminist literary critic Cora Kaplan, who died in November, I had two equally powerful but perhaps contradictory impressions: on the one hand, the sustained political energy of the writing, the refusal at any historical moment over the past forty years to relinquish the belief that cultural and literary analysis and production play a – sometimes the – key role in drawing the imaginative landscape for radical political transformation; on the other hand, a no less relentless charting of the decline of political utopianism from the heady euphoria of the 1960s and 1970s – ‘For me,’ she writes in the introduction to her essay collection Sea Changes (1986), ‘those years were as close as I have ever come to an unalienated experience of political life’ – through the long night of Thatcherism to the ruthlessly conservative modernising agendas of Tony Blair and New Labour, still with us today ...”