Bertha von Suttner

Von Suttner was an impoverished Austrian countess who took work as a governess, fell in love with the son of the house and eloped, and answered a newspaper advertisement in Paris for a secretary. The advertiser was Alfred Nobel. She lasted a week before returning to marry, but they corresponded for the rest of his life, and she spent years pressing him on the argument that a man who had made his fortune from explosives owed the world something. His will, which endowed a prize for peace, was signed the year after one of her letters on the subject.

Her novel Lay Down Your Arms, published in 1889, followed a woman through four wars and refused every consolation offered by military glory; it was translated into a dozen languages and made her the best-known pacifist in Europe. She founded the Austrian peace society, edited a journal, lobbied at The Hague conferences, and was mocked in the press as an hysteric. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905. She died in Vienna on 21 June 1914, seven days before the shots at Sarajevo, and was cremated at Gotha at her own instruction.