Gillian Beer has been King Edward VII Professor of English Literature and President of Clare Hall College, Cambridge. She has taught at the universities of London, Liverpool, Virginia, and University of California, Berkeley. Her books include Meredith: a Change of Masks (1970), The Romance (1970), Darwin's Plots (1983, 2000), George Eliot (1987), Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (1996) and Virginia Woolf: the Common Ground (1996).

She is married, with three sons and, at present, one grandchild. She has twice been a Booker judge, once as chair, and has also been a judge for the Orange Prize and the David Cohen Prize. She is on the Board of Arts Council East and is President of the British Comparative Literature Association.