78. The Gillian Beer Fan Club

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AMY: Hi everyone. Welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I'm Amy Helmes. 

KIM: And I'm Kim Askew... 

AMY: So Kim, if there were a fan club for this week’s subject, the literary critic Gillian Beer, you'd for sure be in it, right? 

KIM: Yeah, absolutely. I've turned to her scholarship quite a few times, and I'm talking way back in my undergrad days, studying medieval and Renaissance lit and all the way through my graduate studies when I was primarily focused on Victorian lit. I just love her work so much. I'm so excited to talk about it today. And also, I'm excited to learn more about her, because even though I've read her work, I've cited her often ... I don't actually know that much about her. 

AMY: Well, I guarantee you know more than I do, ’cause this is one of those episodes where I consider myself a complete newbie. And I will also confess to being almost scared of anyone at her level of academia. When you hear the number of accolades and awards this woman has, it's incredibly intimidating. I mean, she's actually a Dame of the British empire, awarded that title in 1998. 

KIM: I know, pretty fancy, right? 

AMY: Yes. So anyway, I'm going to be relying on you in this episode, Kim, to walk me through things a little bit. I read a few interviews with Beer, and she really seems like a nice lady. 

KIM: Yeah, she does. Don't be intimidated. It actually reminds me of something. I'm not sure if you know, but, um, the writer Alain de Botton, he wrote, um, How Proust Can Change Your Life and a bunch of philosophy. You know him?

AMY: Yeah.

KIM: So when I was living in London, briefly, several years ago, I actually wrote him a letter -- an email -- asking him if he knew of any Proust clubs in London, because I thought, you know, who else would know if there are Proust clubs in London? And he wrote me back! Like within 24 hours, the nicest email. No, he didn't know of any, but he was very complimentary about my writing, which, you know, I had a blog at the time (of course, like everyone did back then.) And he was very complimentary and nice. And we actually exchanged a couple of emails. 

AMY: That's amazing! We're going to say you and he are great friends. We're just going to like, augment that.

KIM: I definitely think so. Yeah. We’d know each other in a crowd. Yeah, for sure. Anyway...

AMY: Yeah, that's a good point. Just because somebody's super smart and intellectual doesn't mean they're unapproachable. 

KIM: Yes.

AMY: Um, okay. But getting back to Gillian Beer, what do we know about her in terms of her life story?

KIM: Okay. So let's start out with the fact that she was born in Surrey, England in 1935 and she was the daughter of a teacher and a university professor.

Okay. That makes sense right off the bat. The children of teachers are always smart, I think. And I can say that pretty brazenly as I am the daughter of a school teacher.

KIM: Hi, Phyllis! (That's Amy's mom.) Um, my mom had a few careers, one of them was teaching high school computer classes. So I guess I'm kind of in that club a little bit, too. Anyway, there's a great article by Claire Armistead in The Guardian that talks a bit about Beer’s childhood (and we'll link to it in the show notes) that was super helpful. 

AMY: Yes. Okay. And so that is one of the first articles I read when we were getting ready for this episode, and it was great. It really filled me in, and I suddenly was super into this woman just from reading one article. You turned me on to somebody and hopefully we're going to do that to some listeners.

KIM: All right. So to summarize her article a bit, as a young child Beer lived with her divorce mom, and they lodged in the home of a family of bricklayers, but then she was sent off to convent boarding school at age 11. And it sounds like from the article that local officials actually got involved because they didn't think her living conditions were safe at the bricklayers. 

AMY: They decided that she needed to be carted off to this boarding school for her own good, it sounds like. 

KIM: Yeah. But she didn't like being away from her mom, of course, and that sounds really sad. But then something happened to her. 

AMY: Right. She fell down a flight of stairs and hurt her back, which sounds awful. Thank God she survived that. But in a weird twist of fate, it sort of sent her on this trajectory that would become her career because while she was home laid up for six months, she started to read a ton of great literature to pass the time. Just whatever she could get her hands on. She particularly loved Henrik Ibsen, Oscar Wilde…

KIM: Yeah. And there's a funny anecdote where she actually says, "I remember being very struck by Ghosts (the play by Ibsen), which I didn't really understand because I didn't know about venereal disease, but I knew about people going mad in a cloistered life." So reading that, I wonder if that was how she felt about convent school, which is ... Yikes! 

AMY: What would you say, she was about a preteen, kind of?

KIM: I think preteen. 

AMY: I can't remember what the article said, but it was like, can you imagine reading those sophisticated writers at that age? It's pretty impressive. Okay, so after boarding school, she went on to St. Anne's College at Oxford. It was a women's college then, and even today it still accepts the highest proportion of female students of any college at Oxford. It was around this time she got married to another scholar and literary critic named John Beer. And while she was pregnant with their first child, she was offered a research fellowship at Girton, the Cambridge college we have mentioned a few times on this show. Rosamond Lehmann, the subject of our episode back in September, went there and she wrote about the college in her book, Dusty Answer. Um, I kind love that Gillian was diving into career stuff at the same time she was having babies. (She gave birth to three sons.) But in that interview we mentioned with Armitstead, she admits that having children did slow her down some, as she really wasn't able to write for five years while her children were young. And I found that refreshing to hear, just because she wasn't some superhuman new mother that was doing all this, you know, intellectual career stuff, and also still raising babies. She was having to juggle, and it was a challenge. But she did say that having kids at that time in her career was so valuable to her because it contributed to the sort of scholarship that she would go on to write about.

KIM: Yeah. It was really interesting that while she was observing her children, she started thinking and mulling over all this stuff about evolution, childbearing, child raising, and all of this ultimately inspired her later writing on Victorian literature. So she was teaching, writing these incredibly academic books and raising her sons. Kind of reminded me of The Lost Daughter, which we have talked about actually quite a bit since we saw it. 

AMY: Yeah. It sounds like Gillian handled it a lot better than, um, well, I can't remember the character's name...

KIM: Yeah. It's like the positive side of being an academic and a mother. 

AMY: Yeah, Gillian Beer said she really enjoyed motherhood when her kids were young. There was no facet of her that wanted to run away and flee. 

KIM: No, it doesn't sound like it. 

AMY: In fact, it sounds like her early career at Girton was really magical for her.

KIM: Yeah, she actually said, "I don't want to construe my life romantically as this poor little girl who somehow managed to end up a Dame and a professor. But at the same time, all that happened. I'm a historical remnant from the great days of free education I was carried through by the state." I love that she acknowledges, you know, the big part that that played in the experience that she had and what she was able to do with her career and her life. 

AMY: Yeah, you got to love a rags to riches story. Anyway, her first book came out in 1970. It was called Meredith: A Change of Masks. That's about the Victorian novelist and poet George Meredith. And, forgive me for saying that I do not know George Meredith.

KIM: I didn't either. I had to Google him, so don't feel bad. I had no idea. He might be more well-known in England. 

AMY: True. Um, my cursory internet search of his books did inspire me to bump him higher up on my to-be-read pile after I looked him up because one of his novels, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is inspired by the collapse of his first marriage, and apparently shocked people with its sexual frankness. He was also nominated for the Nobel prize in literature seven times. So now I'm really feeling like an idiot for not knowing George Meredith, but I digress.

KIM: We digress. So getting back to Beer, the same year she published her book on Meredith, she also had another book out. So two in the same year. And this one was called The Romance. It's about romantic literature from the Middle Ages through the 20th century. So especially the stuff from the Middle Ages and Renaissance I was using all the time and referring to while I was writing my papers in college.

AMY: I think it's interesting, Kim, because I know that you are not as much of a fan of reading non-fiction stuff. What's different about reading her that you super get into it?

KIM: I think because she is writing explicitly about fiction that I'm interested in. So there's that connection there. And then also just the way she looks at science. The way she relates that to fiction, the connection between science and fiction. It's like basically Frankenstein, a nonfiction version, if that makes sense. 

AMY: Okay. Yeah. And we’re going to get into that a little bit more in a second, but getting back to her professional journey, um, she wound up working as a fellow at Girton college for 30 years. And then later she was the King Edward VII professor of English literature at Cambridge.

KIM: Whoa. 

AMY: Yeah. She eventually became president of Claire Hall, Cambridge's postgraduate college. So Kim, as I've already said, I've never read anything she's written. Tell me what else I should know about her in terms of her work.

KIM: Right. So I talked about the connection she makes between humanities and science. She just does it in this really beautiful, compelling way and it kind of appeals to the way my brain works. Um, I think I understand Victorian science better than maybe contemporary science. Um, but also, she's keying in on the symbiotic relationship between narrative storytelling and science, and I really dig that.

AMY: I don't know what you're talking about. 

KIM: Okay. Okay. So I gave a paper at a conference at Claremont Graduate College. It was called Darwinian Theory and its Role in Bleak House. 

AMY: You did?!

KIM: I did. Yeah, didn't tell you? I just did that, you know, one weekend. Anyway. 

AMY: That's really impressive, Kim!

KIM: Thank you. Anyway, so Beer has a 1983 book called Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and 19th Century Fiction. It was a big inspiration for the paper that I gave. And she doesn't discuss Dickens too much in the book. He was my subject in the paper, but um, her writing was more about Thomas Hardy and George Eliot, but it applies Darwinian theory with those authors and it really helped me see Bleak House in a whole new and fascinating way. And then my Henry James thesis was on the literary detective novel, and Victorian science played a big role in that paper too, specifically forensics. So she says in her book, Arguing With the Past, "We need to learn the terms of past preoccupations to experience the pressure within words, now slack, of events, anxieties, and desires." So basically, when you're reading Thomas Hardy, when you're reading George Eliot, when you're reading Henry James, there is a current underneath everything that they're learning about in contemporary science at the time. And it's incredibly impacting their work because all these new innovations are coming up. Darwin is coming up with these incredibly new thoughts that are like sending sparks throughout the entire society. And if you'd read those works from our viewpoint, you don't necessarily get that. She sort of connects you with that. What were they trying to understand then? What were the things they were grappling with at that time? Does that make sense? 

AMY: Yes, that is perfect, how you just described it. Okay. Oh my God. It's like a double whammy because not only is she referencing all these classic books that we love anyway.... I mean, Thomas Hardy is a favorite of mine. I know he's super depressing, but I love him. But you're getting like a master class on how to read it.

KIM: It's so important to understand through that lens, what they were thinking of, what was exciting to them, what they were talking about. And at that time, scientists and writers were almost sometimes the same people because they were doing both. They were in the same journals. I mean, they were in the same places in society. They were in salons. They were all interacting with each other. It's not necessarily the way it is now, which feels much more fragmented. 

AMY: Got it. Okay. So we need to learn the terms of past preoccupations. That's what she meant by that. 

KIM: Yes. Yes. 

AMY: I love that. I feel like I'm Oprah, like, "light bulb moment!" 

KIM: Oh yeah, totally. Ding, ding, ding! 

AMY: Okay. So I can see now how reading her work would give you a new lens with which to look at some of your favorite novels. I totally love it.

KIM: I knew you would. So now you can join the fan club with me. There's stuff of hers that I haven't read. She's also written a book about Virginia Woolf where she looks at To the Lighthouse in relation to the philosophers David Hume and George Berkeley. And I've read Hume and Berkeley in grad school, so I need to re-read Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and also read her book on that. And this is interesting: she's been a judge for the Booker Prize twice. She was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley and Yale, and her most recent book came out in 2016, Alice in Space: The Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll. She won a Truman Capote Award for literary criticism for that book. 

AMY: As somebody who's always wondered what the hell Lewis Carroll was doing... actually, I love Alice in Wonderland, but to have somebody really smart walk me through it sounds amazing. It's making me think of how much we loved being English majors. And you would have your favorite English professors, and it was so fun to just sit in class and hear them talk. Reading her work is like getting to go back and do that and just geek out over all this stuff.

KIM: Exactly. That's exactly how I feel. Oh, I just wanted to also add that she takes quite a bit of time to work on these. So it's not like she's just putting one out every year. These are actually works that take sometimes many years, even decades to write. There's a lot of scholarship that's going into every single book. 

AMY: She just sounds like an academic rockstar.

KIM: Absolutely. And if you loved hearing about her life, she has a short memoir about her childhood in England, just before and during WWII. And I only found out about it while researching this episode, it's called Stations Without Signs, and we'll link to where you can buy it in our show notes. And I think the title refers to the train station signs in England being removed during WWII so as to confuse the enemy. I've ordered the book and I can't wait to read it. And really, everyone who loves reading 19th century fiction, please, please go out and read Darwin's Plots. It will give you an excuse to reread all your favorite novels, as if you needed one. 

AMY: She's kind of the sort of person I would love to go have tea with or something. I feel like she would just be a fascinating conversationalist. And like I said, she seems so nice.

KIM: Yeah, very smart, but very kind at the same time. 

AMY: I mean, I'm thinking if you and I ever go to London, we are going to meet up with all of our UK previous Lost Ladies of Lit guests. So that's Laura Thompson, Lucy Scholes, Judith Mackrell, Lauren Elkin... who am I forgetting? 

KIM: I'm thinking also of future guests, so there's Kate McDonald and Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney. That would be a really great party.

AMY: Somehow we’ve got to get Gillian Beer there, and we're going to just all sit at her feet and worship her like accolytes. And then she will tell us to stop all that stuff and nonsense and pass her another cucumber sandwich. That's what I'm envisioning anyway. 

KIM: Somehow I feel like you two would get along. I feel like I can hear you saying that. 

AMY: Well, anyway, that's all for today's episode. Keep those emails coming in to us, and tune in next week when we'll be introducing you to yet another lost lady of literature.

KIM: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.