Venus in Furs cover art

Venus in Furs

 Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Venus in Furs

By: Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
Narrated by: Zachary Johnson, Verla Bond
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £7.99

Buy Now for £7.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

A must-listen for every classic erotica fan! Performed as a duet by Zachary Johnson and Verla Bond.

The term “Masochist” comes from Austrian author Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch, whose fantasies inspired him to write Venus in Furs in 1870. The story is an account of a man named Severin, who is obsessed with being enslaved by a despotic woman in furs. He finds his ideal in a young widow named Wanda: a reluctant domme who discovers her sadistic tendencies through their twisted love affair.

Venus in Furs was translated into English by Fernanda Savage in 1921.

Public Domain (P)2021 Verla Bond Action & Adventure Classics BDSM Solar System

Listeners also enjoyed...

 The Picture of Dorian Gray cover art
The Lady with the Dog cover art
Dracula's Guest cover art
A Nervous Breakdown cover art
Vintage Vampire Stories cover art
Ghost Stories with Christopher Lee cover art
Dracula's Daughters: Classic Tales of Vampire Women & Their Thirsts cover art
Psycho cover art
Junky cover art
Phenomenology of Spirit cover art
Jane Eyre cover art
Letter from an Unknown Woman cover art
Restoration cover art
The Diary of a Madman and Other Stories cover art
The Oscar Wilde Collection cover art
Le Pere Goriot cover art
All stars
Most relevant
Verla Bond gives a fine performance as Wanda here, and Zachary Johnson handles the absurd character of Severin competently enough but one always feels they are struggling to bring out what might pass as quality from a flawed text. There are faint forerunners here of what Freud was to formalise and bring to wider public consciousness in the decades ahead, but the book can hardly be said to be a legitimate foundation of psychoanalytical theory. It is for the most part an absurd fantasy.

This book has been on my list of reads for some time now, and I’m glad to have ticked it off as a curiosity, but I won’t be re-reading it, I think. However, I will look with interest at other performances by these two talented performers.

Strong performances of a weak work of art

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.