Introduction - Beauty has long been positioned as humanity’s highest value. Plato argued it was the first rung on a ladder to divine truth. John Keats declared “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” as the sum of earthly knowledge. Fyodor Dostoevsky insisted “Beauty will save the world.” Yet English literature from the Victorian to Modernist periods tests these maxims against a harsher reality: beauty functions less as a metaphysical ideal and more as volatile social currency. In the novels of Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf, beauty promises elevation but often delivers exploitation, revealing Socrates’s warning that “beauty is a short-lived tyranny.” This paper argues that English literature interrogates classical and Romantic theories of beauty by dramatizing its commodification, demonstrating that when beauty is traded for marriage, status, or survival, it exacts a moral and existential cost that destabilizes the equation of beauty with truth.