Patricia Beer

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,<ref name=IND>Template:Cite news</ref> a strict religious sect.<ref name="NYT">Template:Cite news</ref> Hymns were the first poetry Beer wrote.<ref name="NYT" /> Her mother worked as a schoolteacher, while her father worked as a railway clerk. Her parents raised her in Withycombe Raleigh, a village near Exmouth.<ref name="ODNB">Template:Cite ODNB</ref> Beer was strongly influenced by the Plymouth Brethren Church, especially its "inward-looking Christianity" and her mother's instilling to her the religion.<ref name="ODNB" /> Death also influenced her work, with two of her grandparents working with coffins and tombstones;<ref name="ODNB" /> as an eight year old, Beer stated she had an abnormal fear of death, and saw poetry and the fame it could bring as a means to cope with eternity. She wanted to be a poet from that age.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Various sources describe her mother as dominant<ref name="ODNB" /><ref name="Guardian">Template:Cite news</ref> or the dominant parent.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Beer wrote of her childhood in Mrs Beer's House, a memoir published in 1968. Her mother wanted her to be a schoolteacher.<ref name="Guardian" /> Patricia went to Exmouth Grammar School after earning a scholarship, where she continued after her mother's death in 1935.<ref name="ODNB" /> She studied English at Exeter University.<ref name=IND /> Beer moved away from her religious background as a young adult, becoming a teacher and academic.<ref name="ODNB" /> She took her Bachelor of Letters degree at the University of Oxford, following which she spent seven years in Italy from 1946 until 1953,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> where she taught English literature at the University of Padua, the British Institute and the Template:Ill in Rome.<ref name=IND/> On this time in her life, Beer stated she was "enjoying [herself] in a way [she] wasn't allowed to when [she] was a child".<ref name=IND/>

She started her career as a writer in the 1950s.<ref name="ARCHIVE">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> 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.<ref name="ODNB" /> From 1968 onwards, she wrote full-time.<ref name=IND/> She edited several anthologies, broadcast, and contributed to literary reviews, including for The Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books.<ref name="ODNB" />

Beer was married twice; first in 1960 to the writer P. N. Furbank, and then in 1964 to John Damien Parsons, an architect, settling in Upottery, near Honiton.<ref name="ODNB" /> Near her death, she was a candidate to replace Ted Hughes as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom.<ref name="NYT" /> Beer died on 15 August 1999 in Upottery<ref name=IND/> of a stroke.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> A compilation of her lengthier reviews under the title As I was Saying was published after her death in 2002.<ref name="ODNB" />

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.<ref name="Persoon">Template:Cite encyclopedia</ref> 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.<ref name="Oxford_Companion">Template:Cite book</ref> Similarly, the bucolic and rural nature of her home in Upottery is thought to have influenced her work.<ref name="Persoon" />

Death is a theme throughout her poetry,<ref name="Blamires">Template:Cite book</ref> especially in Autumn (1997),<ref name="Persoon" /> her last book of poetry. The Guardian described it "more droll than sad" and called her style overall wry melancholy.<ref name="Guardian" /> A writer for the Poetry Archive cited themes of good versus evil and religious beliefs, and said Beer imparts to them a sense of wryness.<ref name="ARCHIVE" /> The Independent said she had a dark humor.<ref name=IND /> On writing poetry, Beer stated there should be a connection between a poet's speaking voice and their writing voice, particularly important when the poet has a regional accent.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> In her book, Reader, she found Jane Austen's women characters to be wanting due to their chasing marriage.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> This represented feminism's early impact on academic criticism.<ref name="Oxford_Companion" />

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",<ref name="Blamires" /> while Michael Schmidt, founder of P. N. Review, compared her to Stanley Spencer in her lucidity and canny innocence. Schmidt said Beer separates herself from Victorian writers through irony, and says she takes religion without belief, but seriously nonetheless. He cites her prosaic poems as her real problem.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> 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.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Selected works

All works cited to the following sources:<ref name=IND/><ref name="ODNB" /><ref name="Guardian" /><ref name="ARCHIVE" />

• 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)

External links

• {{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

|CitationClass=web }} Patricia Beer, literary and personal papers at the University of Exeter

• {{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

|CitationClass=web }} Portrait of Patricia Beer taken in 1990, via the National Portrait Gallery, London