| 1 | Name: | Dame Gillian Beer | |
| Institution: | University of Cambridge | ||
| Year Elected: | 2010 | ||
| Class: | 4. Humanities | ||
| Subdivision: | 402a | ||
| Residency: | International | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1935 | ||
Gillian Beer is a preeminent interpreter of the Victorian novel, particularly of George Eliot and that daughter of the Victorians, Virginia Woolf. Even more importantly, she has been a pioneer in investigating the relations between scientific discourse and imaginative writing in 19th century England. She is particularly known for her work on Darwin, interpreting the imaginative energies and structures of his writings, so as to account for their cultural, in addition to their scientific, importance. She is equally eminent as a leader in English education and in English cultural life in general. She is the author of: Meredith: A Change of Masks, (1970); Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth Century Fiction, (1983); George Eliot, (1986); Arguing With the Past, (1989); Forging the Missing Link, (1992); Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter, (1996); and Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground, (1996). Gillian Beer was awarded the 2017 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism for her book Alice in Space: The Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll. She was vice-president of the British Academy and is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. | |||