Background
Beer, Gillian Patricia was born on January 27, 1935 in Bookham, Surrey, England. Daughter of Owen Kempster Thomas and Ruth Winifred (Burley) Bell.
literary critic president judges
Beer, Gillian Patricia was born on January 27, 1935 in Bookham, Surrey, England. Daughter of Owen Kempster Thomas and Ruth Winifred (Burley) Bell.
Born Gillian Patricia Kempster Thomas in Surrey, England, Beer studied English Literature at Street Anne"s College, Oxford.
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. 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.
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).
Fellow British Academy, Royal Society of Arts. Member University Women.
Married John Bernard Beer, July 7, 1962. Children: Daniel John, Rufus Bernard, Zachary William.