This chapter reads George Eliot’s novel as a classic text of nineteenth-century realism and one of the genre’s most complex manifestations. The first part traces how the novel’s preface introduces, on a metatextual level, the topic of time, of natural and human history and of history’s gendered representation. These issues are then pursued through more specific themes - the ‘Woman Question’, the Great Reform Act, contemporary science - in the fictional world’s multi-strand narration. The second part introduces the concept of realism, which also figures in Eliot’s prose. Points of discussion are the function of the prominent narrator figure and the web of complex metaphors used in constructing the fictional world, as well as strategies to elicit empathy for the characters and even a sense of community in the reader. The last part surveys the novel’s tellingly uneven fate in literary history from contemporary reviews to feminist or post/modernist debates and beyond.