This chapter enquires into the dual definitions of “realism” and “gender,” noting their shared generic messiness and common grounding in Western modernity’s history of capitalism and colonialism. Moving through a feminist and literary-critical tradition from Nancy Armstrong to Naomi Schor and representative British novels such as George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, I observe that gender and race have always played out on the deepest formal levels of realist texts. Chapter 10 ultimately claims that we can read and theorize gender in realism differently when we abandon terms such as “agency” and “identity,” and cease to link the realist novel so tightly to referential fidelity. Turning to psychoanalysis, Black feminist theory, and recent critics of the novel such as Alicia Mireles Christoff and Jill Galvan, I suggest that reading “gendering” as a relational process involving forms of negativity and longing opens the realist novel to different kinds of thinking.