This paper deals with the topic of female characters in three of Edgar Allan Poe’s selected stories: “Ligeia”, “Morella” and “Berenice”. The three characters on which the paper focuses are Ligeia, Morella and Berenice, and it attempts to show that Poe did not write about dying women because he was obsessively influenced by his own experiences, but because he tried to portray a new, "Modern" woman, one whose manifestation of power could best be achieved through death. The paper brings into connection the author’s crucial life experiences, and gender roles in the nineteenth century, with the analyses of the three selected stories, in order to show how they are connected. The women in the stories all have different lives and roles in the story, but are bound together with the idea of death and life after death, as they all die an unexpected death, then come back to life at the end of each story. The paper points to the conclusion that their deaths and rebirths signify the power they have over the men in their lives: Ligeia proves dominion over the narrator’s sanity as well as love interest, Morella proves her intellectual dominion over the narrator once again even after she dies, and Berenice proves dominion over the narrator’s mind. In all of the stories the protagonist’s triumph over death represents the "Modern" woman’s victory over the old, Victorian woman.