Voynich, Ethel (1864–1960)

Irish-born British writer and translator. Born Ethel Lilian Boole in 1864 in Cork, Ireland; died in 1960 in New York City; daughter of George Boole (a mathematician) and Mary Everest Boole (a feminist philosopher); educated in Irish schools and in Berlin; married Wilfrid Michael Voynich (1865–1930), in 1891.

Worked for periodical Free Russia in London; drew on husband's political experiences for the first and best known of her novels, The Gadfly (1897), made into a film in Soviet Union (1955); moved to United States (1916).

Selected writings:

(novels) The Gadfly (1897), Jack Raymond (1901), Olive Latham (1904), An Interrupted Friendship (1910), Put Off Thy Shoes (1945); (translations) Stories from Garshin (1893), The Humour of Russia (1895), Chopin's letters (1931).

Ethel Voynich was born Ethel Lilian Boole in 1864 in Cork, Ireland. Daughter of eminent mathematician George Boole and feminist philosopher Mary Everest Boole , Ethel Boole was educated in Irish schools and later in Berlin, also traveling as a young woman to Russia.

In 1891, she married Wilfrid Michael Voynich, a young Polish exile who in 1890 had escaped to England from exile in Siberia, where he had been sent in 1885 because of his involvement in the anti-tsarist Polish nationalist movement. In England, he had anglicized his name from Habdank-Woynicz after becoming a naturalized British subject. Ethel Voynich worked for a time in London for the periodical Free Russia.

Voynich's first novel, The Gadfly (1897), drew heavily on her husband's political experience and idealistic revolutionary zeal, with which she sympathized. A vehemently anti-clerical novel, The Gadfly is set in pre-1848 Italy and features both a revolutionary young Englishwoman and the "gadfly" hero of the title. A popular success, the book went through eight impressions in four years, selling in vast quantities in translation in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, where it was made into a film in 1955 (with a score by Dmitri Shostakovich).

Voynich's reputation as a writer is largely based on The Gadfly, but she published other novels featuring revolutionary heroes, such as Jack Raymond (1901), the story of a rebel and a Polish patriot's widow; Olive Latham (1904), about an English nurse and a Russian revolutionary; and An Interrupted Friendship (1910), which continues the story of The Gadfly. None of her later novels are considered the equal of her first, and are chiefly characterized by an obsession with violence and physical suffering.

In addition to novels, Voynich published two translations of Russian stories, Stories from Garshin (1893) and The Humour of Russia (1895), and a translation of Chopin's letters (1931). In 1916, Voynich and her husband moved to the United States, where she continued writing, publishing her last novel, Put Off Thy Shoes, in 1945. She died in 1960 in New York.

sources:

Drabble, Margaret, ed. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 5th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Shattock, Joanne. The Oxford Guide to British Women Writers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Paula Morris , D.Phil., Brooklyn, New York