Dame Gillian Patricia Kempster Beer, DBE, FBA (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.
Born Gillian Patricia Kempster Thomas in Surrey, England,[1] Beer studied English Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford.
Darwin's Plots (1983), in particular, related the form of Victorian novels to Darwinist thinking.
She has also written important collections of essays on Virginia Woolf (The Common Ground, 1996) and on other aspects of the relations of literature, science, and other academic disciplines.