When Woody Allen - sorry, Alvy Singer - first enters Annie Hall's apartment, his chat-up strategy includes a would-be erudite remark about her copy of Sylvia Plath's Ariel: "Interesting poetess, whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college-girl mentality." It's a good gag, but it's not exactly untrue, either. And this way of thinking about the much mythologised Plath's miserable end is echoed by many responses to the deaths of fictional women.

Take Emma Bovary. She herself is smitten with cheap romantic ideals, and takes a fatal dose of arsenic in what she expects will be an "ecstasy of heroism". Flaubert's novel was deliberately trying to puncture novelistic romance with realism, and the death she suffers is duly horrific, shattering any notions of romance, even in Emma herself. And yet, a couple of years ago Madame Bovary was voted one of the "50 best romantic reads". Commenting on the poll, AS Byatt said it was the least romantic book she had ever read, and if it is tragic "it is not in a romantic way" - and to read it thus diminishes its real pathos.

And so it is with the likes of Desdemona, Anna Karenina, Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Ophelia. As anyone who has ever had to read these texts at school or university will know, the deaths of these heroines are often held up as romantic touchstones by overexcited students. Which means they miss how their stories are critical reflections on how a society treats women.

The treatment of Tess is an image of Victorian attitudes at their very worst, with her terrible, drawn out punishment for being raped. Similarly, Ophelia is trampled on by all the men she loves most, and Desdemona is required to constantly justify herself to her father, her husband and the rest of society. Anna Karenina pays a dreadful price for trying to break out of the narrow life she's found herself in.

You'd think it would be impossible to find romance in these stories, but people do. Can anybody tell me why?