She worked for two years as a critic and contributing editor for New York magazine, for which her first assignment was interviewing Norman Mailer.
She wrote an early appreciation of Monique Wittig's second novel, Les Guérillères, in The New York Times Book Review.
Beauman's first work of non-fiction was The Royal Shakespeare Company's Centenary Production of Henry V (Pergamon Press, 1976),[2] a study of the RSC's 1975 staging.
In 1982, to coincide with the opening of the Barbican Theatre in London, the Oxford University Press published her study of The Royal Shakespeare Company: A History of Ten Decades (ISBN 0192122096), chronicling the turbulent history of what was to become the RSC from its first founding as a small seasonal theatre in Stratford upon Avon in 1879.
Her novel The Visitors (2014) concerns the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in the Valley of the Kings in 1922, the subterfuge that attended it, and the political turmoil it caused.