Undertaking a comparative analysis of Anna Karenina and The Awakening, this paper analyzes the constructions, implications, and possible meanings of romantic love and its influence on maternity and family relationships. Both text’s female protagonists, Anna and Edna, end their lives by committing suicide after their dejection by and rejection of romantic love. Feminist approaches often interpret the protagonists’ choices as positively unconventional decisions to demonstrate autonomy and independence. However, there are other ways to read these tragedies too, and this paper partly asserts that celebrating or idealizing the protagonists’ acts occludes a set of larger contextual pictures. This paper reads both texts as revealing the modern myth of romantic love, delineated as potentially fatal to maternal women. Both texts’ realistic depiction of marital crisis, and the subsequent development of adulterous romantic affairs, can be read to imply that female happiness arises within social forms in which married women remain active in roles such as the “respectable wife” and “competent mother.” Taking its lead from these texts, this paper asserts that marriage and maternity can be reconsidered not as some kind of biological destiny to be condemned and denied, but as potentially individually empowering, a set of social constructs to be not only acknowledge but, indeed, celebrated and encouraged.