Name Gillian Beer | ||
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Books Darwin's plots, Open Fields: Science i, Virginia Woolf: The Common, The romance, Arguing with the past |
Dame gillian beer darwin s universal impact mon 6 july
Professor 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
- Dame gillian beer darwin s universal impact mon 6 july
- alice in time by dame gillian beer
- Early life
- Academic career
- Honours and awards
- Family
- Literary criticism
- References

alice in time by dame gillian beer
Early life

Born Gillian Patricia Kempster Thomas in Surrey, England, 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.
Honours and awards

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