Publisher's Synopsis
Venus in Furs is a story by the Austrian novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, and it is the best known of his works. The fiction was to be part of an epic list that Sacher-Masoch envisioned and called Legacy of Cain. The novel describes themes, like female dominance and sadomasochism, and character inspiration heavily from Sacher-Masoch's own life. Wanda von Dunajew, the book's central female character, was modeled after Fanny Pistor, that was an emerging writer. They met when Pistor contacted Sacher-Masoch, under feigned name and fictitious title of Baroness Bogdanoff, for recommendations on improving her writing to make it suitable for publication. The framing story involves a man who dreams of speaking to Venus regarding love while she wears furs. The unnamed storyteller tells his thoughts to a friend, Severin, who tells him how to break himself of his fascination with the evil women by reading a manuscript, Memoirs of a Supersensual Man. This manuscript is the story of a man, Severin von Kusiemski, who is so obsessed with a female, Wanda von Dunajew, that he requests to be her slave, and urges her to treat him in progressively more humiliating ways. At first, Wanda does not accede to the request, but after humoring Severin a bit, she discovers the advantages of the method to be interesting and enthusiastically welcomes the idea, although at the same time she despises Severin for allowing her to do so. Severin describes his feelings during these experiences as suprasensuality. Severin and Wanda travel to Florence. Along the way, Severin takes the general Russian servant's name of "Gregor" and the performance of Wanda's servant. In Florence, Wanda treats him mercilessly as a domestic and recruits a trio of African women to dominate him. The connection arrives at a crisis when Wanda meets a man to whom she would like to control, a Byronic hero known as Alexis Papadopolis. At the end...
