SOURCE: "The Landscape of Reality," in The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley, University of Chicago Press, 1981, pp. 204-26.

In the following excerpt, Levine analyzes the narrative of Gaskell's novella Cousin Phillis, placing the work within the Victorian realistic tradition.

Since, in keeping with the compromises realism entails, the landscape of the real is consistently rather flat, or at best rolling, a topographical survey of the Victorian novel would produce a large and unilluminating catalogue. It is worth pausing, however, for a glance at a characteristically low and domesticated landscape in order to gather some sense of the way such a landscape at once denies and imitates more absolute and more frightening realities, and accommodates itself to the more subtle shades, the less checkered patterns of the novelist's reality. A convenient place to look for such a landscape—although it is also the landscape of...