Patricia Beer

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. ==Style, analysis and themes==

When she began to write in the 1950s, her style fell into neo-romanticism of Britain post-World War II, though her style departed from neo-romanticism as she developed. Contemporary critics influenced Beer, with her stating she could not do her best poetry while thinking about them. As she progressed, her writing shifted from the use of personae and similes to incorporating metaphor. Beer integrated literary figures native to England into works frequently. Gerard Manley Hopkins is cited as an influence for Beer to depart from strict metre later in her career. 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: • The Loss of the Magyar (1959) • The Survivors (1963) (poems) • Just Like the Resurrection (1967) (poems) • ''Mrs. Beer's House'' (1968) (autobiography) • The Estuary (1971) (poems) • Reader: I Married Him (1974) (criticism) • Driving West (1975) • ''Moon's Ottery'' (1978) (historical novel) • Poems (1979) • The Lie of the Land (1983) • Collected Poems (1988) (poems) • Friend of Heraclitus (1993) • Autumn (1997) (poems) • As I was Saying (2002) (collection of reviews) ==References==