Phyllis graduated from Radcliffe College in 1964 summa cum laude and spent a year at Yale studying English literature. She returned to Harvard to finish her graduate studies, specializing in nineteenth-century English literature and writing a dissertation on Dickens which became the basis for her classic work, Parallel Lives.
She began teaching English literature in 1969 as an assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut where she spent her entire career, becoming a full professor with tenure in 1976 and retiring in 2005. She spent one year (1981-82) as a visiting professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley.
At Wesleyan, she taught a wide range of subjects, including the Victorian novel, the modern novel, Shakespeare’s plays, and fiction writing. In the latter stage of her career, she innovated in the teaching of fiction writing by using guest editors on the Internet to comment on students’ work. This enabled fiction writing to be taught to larger groups than usual.
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