Patricia Beer (4 November 1919 – 15 August 1999) was an English poet and critic. 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. Exposure to death during childhood also influenced her work. She earned a Bachelor of Letters degree at the University of Oxford, after which she taught in Italy for seven years. Returning to England, she began to publish poetry in 1959, and wrote full-time since 1968. Near her death, she was a candidate to replace Ted Hughes as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. Beer died in Upottery in Devon on 15 August 1999.
Beer's poetry style began as neo-romanticism, but she departed from it as her career progressed. The Oxford Companion to English Literature cites the background and legends of West Country as an influence in her poetry. Harry Blamires compared her work to W. B. Yeats for the way it "sucks the reader into the heart of compulsive inner argument and self-scrutiny", while Michael Schmidt, founder of P. N. Review, compared her to Stanley Spencer in her lucidity and canny innocence. 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.
Biography
Patricia Beer was born on 4 November 1919 in Exmouth, Devon, into a family of Plymouth Brethren, a strict religious sect. Hymns were the first poetry Beer wrote. Beer was strongly influenced by the Plymouth Brethren Church, especially its "inward-looking Christianity" and her mother's instilling to her the religion.
Various sources describe her mother as dominant or the dominant parent. Beer wrote of her childhood in Mrs Beer's House, a memoir published in 1968. Her mother wanted her to be a schoolteacher. where she taught English literature at the University of Padua, the British Institute and the in Rome. Beer returned to England in 1953 where she became Senior Lecturer in English at Goldsmiths' College at the University of London (1962–1968). She wrote Reader, I Married Him, which published in 1974, on Victorian women writers, a work from her time at Goldsmiths. A compilation of her lengthier reviews under the title As I was Saying was published after her death in 2002. 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. Similarly, the bucolic and rural nature of her home in Upottery is thought to have influenced her work. especially in Autumn (1997), In her book, Reader, she found Jane Austen's women characters to be wanting due to their chasing marriage. This represented feminism's early impact on academic criticism. 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". On the latter, Nieragden cites an example where Beer's female victim of an assassin becomes a love target for the assassin himself.
Selected works
All works cited to the following sources: