Gillian Beer


Dame Gillian Patricia Kempster Beer, 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

Following teaching posts at Bedford College, London and the University of Liverpool, 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, the University of Cambridge's distinctive, international postgraduate college.
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, in particular, related the form of Victorian novels to Darwinist thinking. Its significance as a work was confirmed by the publication of a 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 and on other aspects of the relations of literature, science, and other academic disciplines.

Honours and awards

She married the literary critic John Beer in September 1962; they have three sons.

Literary criticism