Gillian Beer

Dame Gillian Beer, DBE (born 27 January 1935), King Edward VII Professor of English Literature and President, Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, is a British literary critic and academic.

Career

Born as Gillian Patricia Kempster Thomas in Surrey, England, She 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.

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. 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)
• Oxford University awarded her an Honorary Doctor of Letters (June 2005)

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)

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)

Source

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

External links

• Biodata on Gillian Beer
• Portrait of Dame Gillian Beer

Awards and achievements
Preceded by Hilary Spurling	Rose Mary Crawshay Prize 1967 and Christine Alexander	Succeeded by Caroline Franklin