At the turn of the last century erotic love was an urgent topic in political debate as well as in fiction. During the "modern breakthrough" (in the 1880s) love was established as a dividing line in the intense cultural debates over gender and modernity. A few decades later the question of love's relation to emancipation was actualised by the movement for women's suffrage. After that, in the course of the 20th century, the concept of love and its possible meanings - including its impact on gender politics - was constantly discussed and negotiated. However, the location of the discussion, as well as its intensity and emphasis, varied from decade to decade. In short, it is possible to describe the changing measurement of love in terms of a continuous depoliticisation and marginalisation in the public sphere, while at the same time the literary interest for love seems to be unbroken. The project aims to map, from a perspective of gender, how changes regarding the view of erotic love are reflected in a number of Swedish 20th-century novels, from Hjalmar Söderberg and Elin Wägner to Ulf Lundell and Agneta Pleijel. The study argues that fiction, and particularly the genre of the novel, may function as a kind of an alternative public sphere where love's position in modernity - as well as its emancipatory potential - is defended by ceaseless re-considerations and re-interpretations.