Lay Down Your Arms: The Autobiography of Martha von Tilling

Suttner, Bertha von, 1843-1914Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 4.0
Word count
860K words
Chapters
86

Tags

English Originals War and Military Fiction Peace MovementWar TraumaAnti-war ThoughtPatriotismPsychological InsightAutobiographySocial ObservationFemale Autobiography

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Lay Down Your Arms: The Autobiography of Martha von Tilling by Bertha von SuttnerAuthor: Suttner, Bertha von, 1843-1914,Language: English, Class: PT: Language and Literatures: Germanic, Scandinavian, and Icelandic literatures, Release Date: Jun 27, 2015

Editor's review

This novel by Austrian peace activist Bertha von Suttner takes the form of a memoir by Martha von Tilling, tracing a life shaped by war and loss that turns her against war. It sets one woman's fate against several nineteenth-century European wars, and its restrained first-person narration shows how war erodes family life and the everyday. Among early anti-war literature it was widely influential. Its value lies not in intricate plotting but in pulling "war" down from grand narrative to the concrete pain of individuals, seen through a woman's eyes; readers feel the author's moral urgency. The style is that of a nineteenth-century English translation—long sentences, much groundwork—and demands patience. For readers concerned with peace, war literature, and women's writing, and as supplementary reading in modern European history and the history of the peace movement.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the preface or learn about the author and her era before starting the text; the protagonist's turn becomes easier to understand.
  2. Read the wars the protagonist lives through against the real historical events, noting how personal narrative and history echo each other.
  3. With long sentences, break them up and grasp the main clause first: get the character's situation and mood, then return for the modifying detail.
  4. After finishing, compare it with the author's other peace-themed works or with war literature of the same period.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
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  60. 60
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FAQ

What kind of book is this? It is a novel written as a memoir, in which Martha von Tilling recounts a life marked by war and loss and the anti-war stance that grew out of it. Strongly pacifist, it is one of the representative texts of late-nineteenth-century European anti-war literature.
Do I need historical background to read it? Background knowledge helps. The book involves several nineteenth-century European wars; knowing the rough timeline and the belligerents beforehand makes the weight of the protagonist's experience clearer. Without it you can still follow the main thread, but you may miss some historical references.
How difficult is the English? It is in the style of a nineteenth-century English translation: long sentences, description interwoven with reflection, not obscure vocabulary but complex syntax. Readers with upper-intermediate to advanced English will get into it fairly easily; beginners should use an annotated or guided edition.
How does it relate to the author's peace activism? The author was an active peace campaigner, and this novel can be seen as a literary expression of her pacifist ideals. Readers can see how personal experience becomes a public stance, but the novel should not be taken as a complete record of the peace movement's history.

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About the author

Suttner, Bertha von, 1843-1914 Author · Austrian · 1843–1914

Bertha von Suttner (1843–1914) was an Austrian pacifist and novelist, and the recipient of the 1905 Nobel Peace Prize. She is best known for her novel Lay Down Your Arms: The Autobiography of Martha von Tilling, which exposes the cruelty of war through a woman's firsthand experience of conflict and bereavement, advocating disarmament and peace. Her writing often uses fictional narrative to carry social criticism, with a direct and deeply moving style that intertwines personal fate with the issues of her time. Her other work, Aseet pois!, likewise continues her anti-war stance. Two of her works are held in this collection. Beyond the above, public information about her early life and education is limited and should not be speculated upon. Her name is often associated with the early international peace movement, and her works had a certain influence on peace advocacy of her era.