Anna Beer, known primarily as an early-modernist, biographer and feminist cultural historian, has recently changed direction. Her first novel, a murder mystery set in Oxford, comes out in April 2025. (It will not come as a surprise that a putative biography of Sir Philip Sidney lies at the heart of the plot - and that the novel engages with our current culture wars.)
Until this swerve to crime, Anna Beer's work focused on biography, primarily aimed at non-specialists, but drawing on the latest research in the field. Bess: The Life of Lady Ralegh, Wife to Sir Walter, the first life of this important early-modern figure, was published in 2004, followed by John Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer and Patriot (Bloomsbury, 2008). Anna's most influential book has been her 2016 Sounds and Sweet Airs: the Forgotten Women of Classical Music (Oneworld Publications), which was runner-up for the Royal Philharmonic Society Creative Communications award in 2017 and has attracted extensive media coverage and collaborations on film, television and radio (including the 2024 film Fanny: the Other Mendelssohn, a BBC Four documentary (June 2018), and two radio series for Classic FM. Anna continues with these creative collaborations to help this under-represented music be heard.
For the anniversary of his death, in October 2018, Anna returned to her academic roots, publishing Patriot or Traitor: the Life and Death of Sir Walter Ralegh (Oneworld Publications). This too is currently being developed for TV, drama rather than documentary, together with its earlier companion, Bess. In 2021, she published William Shakespeare: The Life of the Author, one of the launch volumes for the Wiley Blackwell series, The Life of the Author. Anna Beer's latest non-fiction book is Eve Bites Back: An Alternative History of English Literature (Oneworld, 2022) which offers a different take on traditional literary history, exploring the life and work of eight major authors – all women – from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century. Eve Bites Back has been described, by novelist A. L. Kennedy, as a ‘smart, funny and highly readable journey through the lives of women writers and the challenges they and their works face. It’s an informative, enthusiastic and rightly enraging tour de force.’
Academic and educational publications include a re-assessment of Sir Walter Ralegh’s poetry in relation to Edmund Spenser (Literary Ralegh, Manchester University Press, 2013); an article about the gendering of commercial biography (in Lifewriting, 2012), republished in the Blackwell Companion to Literary Biography (2018) and study guides on Andrew Marvell’s poetry, Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, Wycherley’s The Country Wife and Shakespeare’s Hamlet (all for Oxford University Press).
Anna is on the Advisory Board of the Kellogg College Centre for Creative Writing and is closely involved with the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College for whom she is organising an event (Writing Women) in Hilary 2023.
