Realism and modernism are often taken to be opposed literary movements, typically defined by an emphasis on content and form, respectively. When we look closely at the practices of the modernists, however, we see that they remain invested in many of the same concerns as realists – sociality, community, sentiment – even if these appear in new forms. Beginning with Henry James’s lifelong, and contradictory, engagement with George Eliot, this chapter then compares James Joyce’s Ulysses to Middlemarch, demonstrating their shared commitment to the ability of the aesthetic to both reveal and shape our common social world.