Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch was born on 27 January 1836 into Austrian nobility and built a career writing romantic stories drawn from Galician life. During his lifetime he was recognized as a man of letters who wove socialist and humanist ideals through both his fiction and journalism. His contemporary Richard von Krafft-Ebing, an Austrian psychiatrist, coined "masochism" from Sacher-Masoch's surname — a label the writer himself rejected. He died on 9 March 1895, his utopian body of work largely untranslated into English, his name fixed to a concept he never endorsed.