Gillian Beer
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.
Contents
Early life
Born in Surrey, England,[1] 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.[citation needed]
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)[2]
- Oxford University awarded her an Honorary Doctor of Letters (June 2005)
- Harvard University awarded her an Honorary Doctor of Letters (May 2012)
Family
She married the literary critic John Beer in September 1962;[3] 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)
Bibliography
- A full bibliography of Gillian Beer's work may be found in:
- Literature, Science, Psychoanalysis, 1830-1970: essays in honour of Gillian Beer (Helen Small, Trudi Tate, editors), Oxford University Press, 2003)
References
Source
- MacLeod, Donald. "Dame Gillian Beer", The Guardian (29 June 2004).
External links
| Awards and achievements | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by | Rose Mary Crawshay Prize 1967 and Christine Alexander |
Succeeded by Caroline Franklin |
| Academic offices | ||
| Preceded by | King Edward VII Professor of English Literature University of Cambridge 1994 to 2002 |
Succeeded by David Trotter |
- Pages containing links to subscription-only content
- Articles with unsourced statements from October 2009
- 1935 births
- Living people
- Alumni of St Anne's College, Oxford
- British literary critics
- Dames Commander of the Order of the British Empire
- Fellows of Clare Hall, Cambridge
- Fellows of Girton College, Cambridge
- Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- People from Surrey
- Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature
- Rose Mary Crawshay Prize winners
- Presidents of Clare Hall, Cambridge
