Wilfred, meanwhile, became a noted antiquarian bookseller. A final novel, on the early life of the Gadfly heroine, was a critical and popular failure. Joining her husband in New York in 1920, she devoted herself to music, publishing cantatas and a translation of ChopinвЂ™s letters.

None of VoynichвЂ™s next three novels вЂ“ Jack Raymond (1901), Olive Latham (1904), and An Interrupted Friendship (1910) approached this success.Дuring the first World War she undertook social work with the Quakers. Its attraction came from the combination of idealism, intrigue and anti-clericalism with the psychological fascination of the main character. Set in 1840s Italy, the book had nothing to do with socialism. Translated into more than 30 languages, it was acclaimed in the USSR as one of the worldвЂ™s great novels, and adapted for theatre, opera and cinema.ДЄ 1955 Soviet film version with a score by Dmitri Shostakovich won an award at Cannes. It appealed to revolutionaries of all hues: it was widely read in the British labour movement into the 1920s, and by Irish republicans. The Gadfly was an international bestseller. One later critic described her as вЂњone of the most impressive attempts of the time to present an emancipated womanвЂќ. The heroine, Gemma Warren, was drawn from Charlotte Wilson, mistress of a Russian anarchist. From Reilly came his South American adventures, and from Voynich his prison experiences and nationalism. She drew on both Reilly and her husband for the main character of her first novel, The Gadfly, in 1897.

Nancy Cunard, the interwar poet and rebel descended from Robert EmmetвЂ™s family.

The patriotic cellist who refused to play Rule, Britannia!.

They travelled Italy together until he deserted her in Florence. In 1896 she had an affair with Sidney Reilly, a British secret service spy said to have 11 passports and a wife to accompany each.

Encouraged by Stepniak, she published translations from Russian. In 1894 Ethel Voynich made a dangerous journey alone to the Ukraine to organise smuggling of contraband publications.

The couple helped Stepniak with his propaganda. Having learned Russian in London from an exiled revolutionary, Sergei Kravchinski (alias Stepniak), she travelled in Russia, giving music lessons in St Petersburg, meeting families of political prisoners, and providing medical assistance to the poor.Д«ack in London she married a Polish exile named Habdank-Woynicz, recently escaped from Siberia he anglicised his name to Wilfred Voynich. She studied music in Berlin with the proceeds of a small inheritance. Reared in the bohemia of her motherвЂ™s London home (except for two years with an emotionally abusive uncle), Ethel dressed in black from age 15 until her marriage, in mourning for the state of the world. After the death of Professor Boole, the family moved to England. She was born in 1864 in Ballintemple, Co Cork, youngest of five daughters of mathematician George Boole and Mary Everest, an educational psychologist and niece of Sir George Everest, the British surveyor and geographer after whom Mount Everest is named.

Ethel Voynich had an unlikely background for a revolutionary heroine, whose first novel earned her fans among both Irish republicans and the British labour movement.

Voynich manuscript women