Patricia Beer (4 November 1919 – 15 August 1999) was born to a family of Plymouth Brethren, a strict religious order. She studied at the universities of Exeter and Oxford, then taught in Italy for seven years. On returning to England in 1953, she became Senior Lecturer in English at Goldsmiths, University of London (1962–1968). She began to publish poetry in 1959, and wrote full-time from 1968.
She published seven collections of poetry with the Carcanet Press, including The Survivors (1963), The Estuary (1971), Friend of Heraclitus (1993), which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, and Autumn (1997). Her Collected Poems was published in 1988. She published the autobiographical work, Mrs. Beer’s House (Carcanet Press, 1968), literary criticism on Victorian women writers, Reader: I Married Him (Macmillan, 1974) and the novel Moon’s Ottery (Carcanet Press, 1978).
