In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Anna Beer, the author of five acclaimed biographies and a Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College in Oxford, chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting Eve Bites Back: An Alternative History of English Literature.
Anna Beer on ‘Finding the Story, the Red Threads’ in Eve Bites Back
Eve Bites Back
Eve Bites Back includes biographical sketches and reappraisals of eight talented female authors who lived, wrote and published between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries: Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Aemilia Lanyer, Anne Bradstreet, Aphra Behn, Mary Wortley Montagu, Jane Austen and Mary Elizabeth Braddon.
Julian of Norwich (c.1342 – after 1416)
Norwich Cathedral
Fascinatingly, these authors are still in print today. Among them are novelists, autobiographers, travel writers, playwrights, poets, journalists and diarists. Warned not to write—and certainly not to bite—these women put pen to paper anyway and wrote themselves into history.
Jane Austen
Jane Austin Society of North America
Ever since Sappho first put stylus to papyrus, women who write have been labelled mad, undisciplined and dangerous. Funny and provocative, Eve Bites Back offers an alternative history of English literature. Placing the female contemporaries of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton centre stage, Anna Beer builds a vibrant new canon through Restoration wits, scandalous sensation novelists and medieval mystics.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Godfrey Kneller (1646–1723)
Yale Center for British Art
By highlighting the difficulty women have always faced in writing and publishing their work, Anna offers an alternative to some of the more traditional ways of understanding where the books we read come from, who writes them and what survives. Anna explores the ways these eight gamechangers, groundbreakers and genre-makers challenged stereotypes and created memorable stories and characters as they fought to be heard in a world dominated by men.
Aphra Behn
National Portrait Gallery
Praise for Eve Bites Back: An Alternative History of English Literature
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.
A.L. Kennedy
Essential reading.
Claire Tomalin
In this splendid alternative history of English literature, Anna Beer shows that ‘simply by putting words together on the page’ women authors have for centuries fought back... [an] excellent study: ‘let’s scavenge and rebuild in the face of the destruction of women’s work...Let’s find the precious gems amidst the rubble.
Guardian
Eve Bites Back isn’t pleading for justice for female writers, it’s indicting a system that has long ignored them and, to some extent, still does... Part polemic, part revisionist criticism, Eve Bites Back, as its title suggests, is sharp and aggressive, a book that will irritate, enlighten, persuade and provoke argument. It’s a work of correction, in every sense of the word.
Washington Post
A totally absorbing and enlightening tour through the work of eight significant women authors - with one of the funniest introductory chapters ever.
Sarah Bakewell
Writing with energy, wit and at times barely suppressed fury, Anna Beer brings to life the struggle to be heard of eight women writers over 500 years. Her subtle literary excavations are both informative and a gripping read.
David Goodhart, founder editor of Prospect
Startling stories and facts on every page. Written with a clear and authoritative voice, this is both a very entertaining and very important book about the many obstacles that women have overcome to be writers, and the long struggles even the most gifted and well-connected women authors have encountered in order to be taken seriously.
Yasmin Khan, associate professor of history, University of Oxford
Anna Beer is one of those very rare writers who are able to combine rigorous research with a gripping and thoroughly accessible style. This is an ambitious, authoritative, feisty book and a worthy successor to her inspirational Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Forgotten Women of Classical Music.
Kate Kennedy, author of Dweller in Shadows and Cello: Through Silence to Sound
Eve Bites Back ... is shaped by the same principles [as Beer’s earlier work]— feminist indignation, certainly, but also a drive to share ideas and observations about a diverse body of achievement, emerging from historical periods radically different from our own ... invigorating.
Dinah Birch, TLS
A delightful, and challenging read.
New York Journal of Books
A thorough, wide-reaching overview of women’s literary accomplishments viewed through a fresh, modern lens ... Eve Bites Back is an exemplary work of literary criticism.
Foreword Reviews
In her alternative history of English literature, Eve Bites Back, cultural historian and biographer Anna Beer takes up arms against the patriarchy... extensive and meticulous.
Washington Independent Review of Books
Eve Bites Back: Interviews and Conversations with Anna Beer
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Eve Bites Back! An Alternative History of English Literature, The History of Literature Podcast.
About Anna Beer
Dr Anna Beer is a cultural historian and biographer. She is author of Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Forgotten Women of Classical Music and Patriot or Traitor: The Life and Death of Sir Walter Ralegh, as well as biographies of Bess Throckmorton, William Shakespeare and John Milton.
‘I’m really proud of my feisty, feminist and accessible accounts of female creatives’, Anna Beer said, ‘including my most influential book, Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Forgotten Women of Classical Music and, more recently, Eve Bites Back: An Alternative History of English Literature.’
‘A long-time Oxford resident, I’ve held various posts at the University including Director of the Creative Writing MSt and remain a Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College. But the truth is that, although Oxford is home, I’m a traveller at heart – whether on night trains, slow boats, on foot or inside a sturdy vehicle complete with roof tent. When I can, I grab my notebooks and laptop and get the words down while discovering new parts of the world.’
Anna recently published Death of an Englishman: an Oxford mystery, her debut novel.
‘Death of an Englishman: an Oxford mystery is a momentous change from what I’ve been doing for the last 20 years’, Anna noted. ‘Writing biographies, some about people you’ll know (Milton, Ralegh and Shakespeare), others about people you may not know - yet. I’m especially proud of my feisty, feminist and accessible accounts of female creatives: my most influential book, Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Forgotten Women of Classical Music (2016) and my most recent, Eve Bites Back: An Alternative History of English Literature (2022).
But, in other ways, this is Beer business as usual. ‘Death of an Englishman is filled with all the things that I love: strong female characters, fierce historical debates, and - of course - long train rides’, she added. Happy sleuthing!’