This dissertation looks at the works of Lord Byron, John Keats and Mary Shelley in order to understand how and why narratives of romantic desire get articulated through the vocabulary of death in British Romantic literature. In today’s popular culture, we can take for granted the degree to which mortality gets invoked in common axioms related to romantic love and intimacy (both physical and emotional). But what exactly is the logic behind sayings like “till death do us part,” “I would die without you,” or “I’m dying to be with you?” To answer these questions, I look to select poetry and fiction from the latter part of the British Romantic period (1807-1820) by three of the most significant figures of the time. Each of these writers offers important individual contributions to the period’s formulations of gender and subjectivity in relation to love and death. While they make different formal choices and have contrasting affective postures towards desire, these three share a preoccupation with the sheer force of desire. These authors write stories about the unsettling sense that desire is not only continuous with one’s sense of self, but continuing beyond life into death. What makes these Romantics repeatedly voice this idea that desire feels so powerful that the subject themself must be outlived by the enduring force of their own desires? To explain what I mean by the force of desire, I repeatedly turn to the psychoanalytically-inflected work of Lauren Berlant, along with that of other queer theorists like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. I also contextualize these abstract questions about desire and death through the scholarship of Romanticists engaged with the history of sexuality, gender and subjectivity, including Nancy Yousef, Joel Faflak, Tilottama Rajan and Clara Tuite. My dissertation asks contemporary critics and readers of Byron, Keats and Shelley to appreciate the way these authors theorized the desiring subject as binding mortality to the beloved and vice versa. Regardless of whether the actual stakes are true danger or entirely ordinary risks, the Romantics understood that falling in love more often than not feels like a matter or life or death. Anxieties about the reciprocity of desire, the cohesion of one’s sense of self, and the social legibility of romantic relations all get articulated through desirous language permeated by the vocabulary of death and dying. But this recursion to death is not just about repressed fears and fractured subjectivity. We see in each of my chapters how the question of death compels Byron, Keats and Shelley to inhabit open-ended inquiries about unexpected ways of feeling alive and experiencing loving intimacy.