Gillian Beer

Gillian Beer is a lecturer in English and a fellow of Girton College, Cambridge. A study of George Eliot in relation to Victorian feminist writing is due out later this year.

Letter

Difference

23 November 1989

When a reviewer describes a sentence as ‘baffling’ one expects to see it quoted accurately. In Arguing with the past I wrote: ‘Engaging with the difference of the past in our present makes us aware of the trajectory of our arrival and of the insouciance of the past – their neglectfulness of our prized positions and our assumptions.’ Rosemary Ashton (LRB, 23 November) changes ‘the past’...
Letter

What about the aeroplanes?

23 April 1987

SIR: I sympathise with Lucio Ruotolo’s response (Letters, 4 June) to a lukewarm review, though I do not accept his explanation of it. I read his book, and thoroughly. His letter shows again the tendency to ignore ‘dangerous junctures’ which mutes his discussion of anarchism. What would Virginia Woolf’s interrupting eye have made of his smooth passage from her society ‘without leaders or any...
Letter

Clarkey

7 February 1985

Gillian Beer writes: My point was not that there should be no selection, but that the principles of selection should be made clear. It is not possible in Clarkey to distinguish between gaps in the source-material and the editor’s choice, or to know the grounds of that choice.

Pieces about Gillian Beer in the LRB

Englamouring the humdrum

Rosemary Ashton, 23 November 1989

Gillian Beer’s Arguing with the past, a collection of essays published in recent years (with one, on Richardson and Milton, dating from as long ago as 1968), is richly written, contains...

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Homage to Mrs Brater

Rosemary Ashton, 7 August 1986

Was it sisterly or unsisterly of George Eliot to celebrate in Middlemarch Dorothea’s contribution to human progress by means of ‘unhistoric acts’ carried out under limiting...

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Taking Darwin in

Michael Mason, 16 February 1984

This is at once an impressive, even thrilling book, and quite a bad one. Its virtues and vices are connected. The author has a precisely-grounded exhilaration about The Origin of Species; perhaps...

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