As I Was Saying Yesterday: Essays: Selected Essays - Softcover

At the time of her death in 1999, Patricia Beer had been planning a collection of her essays. She liked the title As I Was Saying Yesterday: it caught at once the speaking quality of the essays and the consistency of concern which runs through a body of work disparate in subject-matter.

This collection offers the wise, wickedly wry extended essays that Beer wrote for the London Review of Books, the Listener, and the Times Literary Supplement during the last 25 years of her life. Borrowing literary examples from Dickens, Owen, and Shakespeare, Beer's satire belongs to the generation including D. J. Enright and Donald Davie and covers remarkably varied subjects. A critic of contemporary literary trends and religious fervor, Beer was known by one critic as "a religious poet stripped of the blurring consolations of religion."