Born to a family of Plymouth Brethren, a strict religious order, she took inspiration for her poetry from there, with particular influence from her mother who instilled the religion into her from a young age.

The Oxford Companion to English Literature cites the background and legends of West Country as an influence in her poetry.

Her 1974 Reader, I Married Him, in which she found Jane Austen's women characters to be wanting due to their chasing marriage, represented feminism's early impact on academic criticism.

Patricia Beer was born on 4 November 1919 in Exmouth, Devon, into a family of Plymouth Brethren,[1] a strict religious sect.

[3] Beer was strongly influenced by the Plymouth Brethren Church, especially its "inward-looking Christianity" and her mother's instilling to her the religion.

[8] Beer returned to England in 1953 where she became Senior Lecturer in English at Goldsmiths' College at the University of London (1962–1968).

[3] Beer was married twice; first in 1960 to the writer P. N. Furbank, and then in 1964 to John Damien Parsons, an architect, settling in Upottery, near Honiton.

[10] According to The Oxford Companion to English Literature (2009), the folklore and background of the West Country created the basis for many of Beer's poems.

[5] A writer for the Poetry Archive cited themes of good versus evil and religious beliefs, and said Beer imparts to them a sense of wryness.

[13] In her book, Reader, she found Jane Austen's women characters to be wanting due to their chasing marriage.

[15] Göran Nieragden states that Beer's "I" stages an ego and forms an identity that is non-permanent and context bound and that "'[f]uzzy' boundaries often mark the interface of the me and the you, of self and other".