For the first time, a brilliant, raunchy group biography of the Great Seducer and the women he loved.
The eighteenth-century adventurer Giacomo Casanova used his magnetic personality to talk his way into the beds of more than two hundred women, and turned his name into a synonym for seduction. Charming, brilliant and devastatingly attractive, he claimed to like women and to understand their emotional and sexual needs. To those he truly loved, Casanova was the perfect lover - thoughtful, generous and imaginative. To others he was as ruthless, selfish and dishonest as any man of his time.
But who were the women upon whose naked backs Casanova built his reputation? In Casanova's Women, Judith Summers gives them a voice for the first time. She looks at history's most famous seducer from a female point-of-view - a long overdue perspective - and examines his dark side and the secret of his self-proclaimed success. From the two sisters with whom he had his first sexual experience to the libidinous Venetian nun who defied God in order to sleep with him, from the wealthy widow he tricked out of a fortune to the glamorous and daring Henriette, the woman he loved most but could never possess, 'Casanova's Women' explores the remarkable stories of the women who fell under Casanova's spell - and those who resisted him.
