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.
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Born as Gillian Patricia Kempster Thomas in Surrey, England,[1] 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.
She married the literary critic John Beer in September 1962; [3] they have three sons.
| Awards and achievements | ||
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| Preceded by Hilary Spurling |
Rose Mary Crawshay Prize 1967 and Christine Alexander |
Succeeded by Caroline Franklin |