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“... In her first public writing after her elopement with George Henry Lewes in 1854, George Eliot compared the position of women in England and in France: ‘in France alone the mind of woman has passed like an electric current through the language, making crisp and definite what is elsewhere heavy and blurred.’ And, writing under cover of anonymity for the Westminster Review, she declared that one reason for the achievement of women in France is ‘laxity of opinion and practice with regard to the marriage-tie ...”

“... If one spirit animates the whole, what about the aeroplanes?’ queries a character in Virginia Woolf’s last novel, Between the Acts. Both Alex Zwerdling in Virginia Woolf and the Real World and Lucio Ruotolo in The Interrupted Moment engage with the implications of this question – though neither has much to say about aeroplanes. Zwerdling concentrates on Woolf’s ‘intense interest in the life of society and its effect on the individual’; Ruotolo emphasises ‘the rhythm of broken sequence ...”

“... 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 many sharp critical insights, and shows the author to have a good ear for nuances of language in the literary works she chooses to discuss ...”

“... ambivalence on the woman question is discussed, among other things, in two recent books, by Gillian Beer and Alexander Welsh. Gillian Beer, with a nice sense of the difficulty of taking up a single-minded position on the question of whether George Eliot was more liberated or more constrained about women’s ...”

“... that too often scuttle to a modish vocabulary for refuge (it is undignified in a scholar of Mrs Beer’s seniority to use ‘deconstruct’ when she means ‘dismantle’, ‘recuperate’ when she means ‘recover’, and ‘fracture’ and ‘problematise’ when she means scarcely anything at all). She feels the nuclearity of The Origin, how you can go ...”

“... distinguished collection, valuable to anyone interested in 19th and 20th-century literature. Gillian Beer on George Eliot and Woolf, Cora Kaplan on Emily Dickinson, Showalter on feminist poetics, Elaine Feinstein on Tsvetayeva, Goode on Jude the Obscure, Jacobus on Villette, all offer criticism that is original in its detail and tough-minded in its ...”

“... Austen’s plot, which she called ‘a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden’. Recently Gillian Beer even announced the death of the traditional women’s novel: instead of the masochistic themes of unrequited love, she said at the Hay Festival, ‘women have freed themselves to write more forcefully about much larger ...”

“... theory on the art and literature of the 19th century – by James Secord in Victorian Sensation, Gillian Beer in Darwin’s Plots and A.N. Wilson in God’s Funeral – that it is surprising as well as frustrating that Harris takes no account of it. Had she been more curious about the variety and striking contrasts that characterise Victorian weather it ...”

“... of himself and Mary, still in a sense attempting to exorcise its trauma by means of art. (Gillian Beer has explored this brilliantly in Meredith: A Change of Masks.) Dramatised on the stage, the relationship could have shown a conflict of almost Ibsenian power, presented in terms of modernised Restoration Comedy. Sadly, the fine project was never ...”

“... Within a couple of paragraphs in Injury Time, he moves from Yeats to David Beckham to Dame Gillian Beer – consummations devoutly to be desired. He is consistently pleasantly unpredictable, in the way that, say, E.B. White was consistently pleasantly unpredictable, or perhaps Alastair Cooke delivering his weekly Letter from America. Picking up a ...”

“... from his noble purpose – or, in Adam’s case, his noble lack of purpose – is now praised, as Gillian Beer has praised her, for being ‘the first scientist’. (Pitt-Kethley, who, unlike most of her sisters, is a feminist in practice as well as in her reading, makes the somewhat sophistical point that ‘it was only Adam who got kicked out of the ...”

“... many points throughout The Intruder fantasy and reality come together in this way. In the preface, Gillian Tindall states that she is not writing about identifiable people or places, yet what she relates is firmly based on actual events, including the final tragedy; it is also the stuff of nightmares. ‘History couldn’t possibly be true because it was too ...”

“... self-indulgence, the dotty and at times distracted character of much of Ruskin’s later writings. Gillian Beer, in a scintillating, funny and touching contribution to The Sun is God, which concerns Darwin’s work on earthworms and Victorian anxieties about the death of the Sun, admits parenthetically that her imaginative pursuit of the latter question ...”

“... expect to divert tough, fast-moving types like Sue Davie and Jane Forsyth: An Easter Egg Hunt by Gillian Freeman is set in a boarding-school during the First World War and has a heroine whose shame is that she has to have an abortion, and Columbine by Raymond Kennedy stars a ‘13-year-old girl wise and foolish beyond her years’. The year is circa 1945. It ...”

“... should on no account now wish to have missed’. Varnhagen, Luxemburg and Arendt form Gillian Rose’s central trio of outsider women thinkers in The Broken Middle (1992), excluded from all clubs by ethnicity and gender, but who learned to use that exclusion as a ‘coign of vantage, in letters as in life’. ‘It was,’ as Arendt put it, ‘the ...”