Book excerpt: Laurence Talairach-Vielmas explores Victorian representations of femininity in fairy tales and sensation novels by authors such as George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Charles Dickens. In the clash between fantasy and reality, these authors create a new type of realism that exposes the normative constraints imposed to contain the female body, and illuminates the tensions underlying the representation of the Victorian ideal.