A headstrong young woman is killed by the narrow-minded society she lives in, who would have forgiven her for betraying her cousin but not for rowing out with a young man alone; forgiven her for marrying him but not if she won’t. Religion, family, and society all conspire to make her guilty about who she is. She survives her family being ruined, her father’s death, then her mother’s, but then must die b/c of the “shame” she brings on the family. The River God comes back to kill her by flooding the Floss, showing that even nature conspires to kill her. In the end, then, realism looks like any method by which a given result seems natural, like it should’ve happened. Realism becomes more about ultimate truth, which is less about empirical data than it is about using all literary means possible. It’s about the rules of experience rather than its appearance.