She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1964 summa cum laude and spent the following year studying English literature at Yale University, for which work she holds an MA.

She returned to Harvard to complete her graduate studies, specializing in nineteenth-century English literature and receiving a Ph.D. in 1970 with a dissertation on Charles Dickens, written under the direction of Jerome Hamilton Buckley.

She remained on the faculty of Wesleyan until her early retirement in 2005, spending one year (1981–82) as a visiting professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley.

[7] The research surrounding Rose's biography of the African-American dancer, Josephine Baker, titled Jazz Cleopatra, was supported by a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation[8] and a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Rose has published countless shorter essays throughout her career, some as a guest columnist for The New York Times in 1983–84,[9] many for The American Scholar,[10] on whose editorial board she has long served.

A Kirkus reviewer explains Rose's method as follows: “She chose the shelf on the basis of a few self-imposed rules: Several authors needed to appear, and only one could have more than five books, of which she would read three; there would be both contemporary and older works; one book needed to be a classic that she had always wanted to read.”[17] Elaine Showalter wrote that "Rose turns naturally to the tools of the contemporary reader—Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, Kindle, iPad—and moves easily between the shelf and the immediately accessible riches of the culture.