He showed a decided preference for delineating cruel, mannish types of women and incredibly weak types of men.
As in the case of Marquis de Sade, we observe here a strange parallelism between the man's writings and his own biography.
Sacher-Masoch's first love was a woman much older than himself, Anna von Kattowitz, who for four years humiliated, insulted and victimised him in every possible way, finally running away with a Russian adventurer.
Then he met Princess Bogdanoff for whom he abandoned temporarily his professional and literary ambitions. She took him to Italy where he was compelled to serve her as a secretary and valet. He enjoyed the relationship, but the princess soon tired of him.
His next liaison was with Baroness Fanny Pistor, with whom he had his picture taken once in the following position: she seated on a sofa and clad in furs, he kneeling at her feet on the floor.
Then came Baroness Reizenstein, whom he could not love very long for she refused to satisfy his morbid craving for physical torture and humiliating treatment and, besides, was homosexual.
Then he became engaged to a young artist, Miss Bauerfeld, of Graz.
Soon after, however, he met an ugly, mannish hysterical person, Vanda Dunayef, who gratified better his perverse leanings and compelled him to break his engagement. A child was born of their union and in 1873 they were married. They traveled from town to town, apparently unable to find peace anywhere, and she finally left him to elope with a reporter from the Paris Figaro.
Sacher-Masoch secured a divorce and married again, this time a motherly type of woman, Hulda Meister, retired with her to the small village of Lindheim and died there on March 9, 1895.