The Marquis de Sade, infamous for his obscene writing and his cruelty to women, nonetheless lived a life dominated by them - his charismatic mother, iron-willed mother-in-law, and his wife. A wife who, despite her husband's peccadilloes, and although their marriage was arranged in order for their families to combine financial and social capital, loved him devotedly for thirty years, through betrayal, imprisonment, and national turmoil.

This biography reveals how Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil, Marquise de Sade, endured the chaos caused by her frenetically dissolute husband with grace, and how she carved out her own independence in an era when women were entitled to little of their own. She bore the Marquis three children, loved him, put up with his wild behaviour, edited his manuscripts for him, tried to help him escape prison by means legal and illegal, and acted throughout the decades of their marriage as his only reliable friend.

Their complex relationship, set against the last years of the Ancien Régime in France, the Revolution and its aftermath, are brought to life with humour and compassion by Margaret Crosland, also the translator of Sade's Gothic Tales. She shows how the Sade marriage symbolized the decay of the old aristocracy and conveys the struggle of one individual to establish her personal identity at a time when women in France had virtually no rights of their own.