Great women from art, literature & myth

Anna Karenina, Tolstoy’s tale of Russian aristocracy, a story of forbidden love - of a love that cost one woman everything. When a married Anna first meets Vronsky there is an instant attraction, an immediacy & danger forged when they both witness a fatal accident at a train station. The two soon become secret lovers, until a public show of affection forces them to confess to a passion much too strong to hide. A proud husband and a society that prides itself upon certain principles (at the sacrifice of both truth & honesty); make it impossible for Anna to find peace. She is shunned by society, her husband refusing to let her go, despite being indifferent towards her; her lover resenting her for what she has cost him. In an act of final desperation, Anna is driven to do the unthinkable:

A feeling seized her like that she had experienced when preparing to enter the water in bathing, and she crossed herself. The familiar gesture of making the sign of the cross called up a whole series of girlish and childish memories, and suddenly the darkness, that obscured everything for her, broke, and life showed itself to her for an instant with all it’s bright past joys. But she did not take her eyes off the wheels of the approaching second carriage, and at the very moment when the midway point between the wheels drew level, she threw away her red bag, and drawing her head down between her shoulders threw herself forward on her hands under the carriage, and with a light movement as if preparing to rise again, immediately dropped on her knees. And at that same moment she was horror-struck at what she was doing. “Where am I? What am I doing? Why?” She wished to rise, to throw herself back, but something huge and relentless struck her on the head and dragged her down. “God forgive me everything!” she said, feeling the impossibility of struggling…..A little peasant muttering something was working at the rails. The candle, by the light of which she had been reading that book full of anxieties, deceptions, grief, and evil, flared up with a brighter light than before, lit up for her all that had before been dark, flickered, began to grow dim, and went out for ever.