Dame Gillian Beer is Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature. She was born 27 January 1935 at Bookham, Surrey. After graduating from English Literature at Oxford she did a series of conferences at the Bedford College of London 1959-1962. In 1993 she became judge of the Man Booker Prize, Vice-president of the British Academy (1994/1996), President of the Poetry Book Society (1992/1996). She is currently a member of the British Academy as well as an honorary member of the American Academy of Science and Arts. Between her books you can find: Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983, second edition 2000) and Virginia Woolf: the Common Ground (1996).