Gillian Beer

Dame Gillian Beer, DBE (b. 27 January 1935, Surrey, England) is a British literary critic.

Born Gillian Patricia Kempster Burley, Beer studied English Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford. She was a fellow of Girton College, Cambridge, for 30 years. She was later King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge, and later President of Clare Hall. She served as chair of the judges for the Booker Prize in 1997. She was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1998. She is married to the literary critic John Beer; they have 3 sons.

Beer's most innovative and important literary criticism lies in the field of Victorian studies. In particular, "Darwin's Plots" (1983), related the form of Victorian novels to Darwinist thinking. Its significance as a work was confirmed by the publication of second edition by Cambridge University Press in 2000. She has also written important collections of essays on Virginia Woolf ("The Common Ground" (1996), and on other aspects of the relations of literature and science.

Oxford University awarded her an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree in June 2005.

Literary criticism

* "" (1970)
* "Darwin's Plots" (1983)
* "George Eliot" (1986)
* "Arguing with the Past" (1989)
* "Open Fields" (1996)
* "Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground" (1996)

Bibliography

:A full bibliography of Beer's work may be found in:
* "Literature, Science, Psychoanalysis, 1830-1970 : essays in honour of Gillian Beer", ed. Helen Small and Trudi Tate (Oxford: OUP, 2003)

Reference sources

* Donald MacLeod. "Dame Gillian Beer", The Guardian (29 June, 2004).

External links

* [http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth134 Bio]
* [http://www.npg.org.uk/live/search/person.asp?LinkID=mp11759 (Portrait)]