From hardworking hands and nimble feet to bloody blows and vicious voices, the body forms the vibrant center of heroines’ adventures, agency, and ardor in the Victorian novel for readers. The diachronic analysis in my study accentuates the importance of corporeality in the four literary works The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Villette, The Portrait of a Lady, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles through the lens of Paul Ricœur’s triple mimesis and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the lived body. This phenomenological approach illustrates that the lived body acts as a versatile, vivacious element in British and American fiction that crescively rises in importance during the mid- to late nineteenth century.