Quick Facts
Biography
Professor Dame Gillian Patricia Kempster Beer DBE (née Thomas; born 27 January 1935) is a British literary critic and academic. She was President of Clare Hall from 1994 to 2001, and King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge from 1994 to 2002.
Early life
Born Gillian Patricia Kempster Thomas in Surrey, England, Beer studied English Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford.
Academic career
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.
Her most intensive literary criticism lies in the field of Victorian studies. Darwin's Plots (1983), in particular, 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 and a third edition in 2009. 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.
Honours and awards
- Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (1998)
- Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2001)
- Oxford University awarded her an Honorary Doctor of Letters (June 2005)
- Harvard University awarded her an Honorary Doctor of Letters (May 2012)
- "Book of Members, 1780-2010: Chapter B" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 29 May 2011.
Family
She married the literary critic John Beer in September 1962; they have three sons.
Literary criticism
- Meredith: A Change of Masks (1970)
- Darwin's Plots (1983)
- George Eliot (1986)
- Arguing with the Past (1989)
- Open Fields (1996)
- Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (1996)
- Alice in Space: The Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll (2016)