The Woman behind the Nobel Peace Prize: Bertha von Suttner and Alfred Nobel

Young Bertha Kinsky, as her maiden name is, came from Austria to work as a secretary for Alfred Nobel in Paris in 1875. This was the beginning of a friendship that would last for more than twenty years, until Nobel's death in 1896. In The Woman behind the Nobel Peace Prize, we follow the ups and downs of their professional and private lives, and see how their stories and thinking interlink. Von Suttner, full of vitality, went from living the nonchalant life of a young aristocrat to become a dedicated peace activist and author - a story of personal growth and female emanicipation. Nobel, an engimatic character who combined technical passion with a literary interest, increasingly looked for ways to support peaceful solutions as an alternative to war, and von Suttner prodded him on through the stages of the writing of his last will.  The reader is also taken on a journey through a Europe in an era of fundamental changes - the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the bourgeoisie, the