Background
Ethel Lillian Voynich was born on May 11, 1864, in County Cork, Ireland. She was the daughter of George Boole, a mathematician, and Mary Everest Boole, a science writer.
In 1885, Voynich Ethel graduated from the Higher Music School in Berlin.
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Ethel Lillian Voynich was born on May 11, 1864, in County Cork, Ireland. She was the daughter of George Boole, a mathematician, and Mary Everest Boole, a science writer.
In 1885, Ethel graduated from the Higher Music School in Berlin.
Ethel Voynich spent two years in Russia between 1887 and 1889, working as a tutor, governess, and music teacher. Her experiences increased her sympathy for the suffering of political prisoners and exiles. She married a Polish nationalist and former Siberian exile. Several of Voynich’s early books were translations of Russian literature and political tracts, and in 1894, Ethel Voynich traveled to Russia to smuggle in some of these illegal publications herself.
Although the Voyniches curbed their association with the Russian revolutionaries long before the Revolution of 1917, E. L. Voynich’s The Gadfly remained a popular novel throughout the Soviet period with immediate relevance to the Russian Revolution.
Voynich’s circumstances were unknown to her Russian readers, and she was unaware of her novel’s influence in that country. In 1955 a group of Soviet journalists visiting the United States interviewed her at her apartment in New York City. They told her that The Gadfly had been a Russian cultural treasure for many years. In her remaining years, the novelist received daily fan mail, visits from the Bolshoi Ballet and other cultural luminaries, official birthday greetings from the Soviet delegation to the United Nations, and royalty checks.
Voynich was exposed to nineteenth-century revolutionary politics at the age of fifteen, when she read a book about Giuseppe Mazzini, the Italian republican, and was captivated by his image, she dressed in black until his marriage in honor of his idealism and in mourning for a world that was not yet free.
Quotes from others about the person
“Voynich was considered a classic Russian writer, included in the Bolshaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopedia, the Literaturnaia Entsiklopedia, and the biographical reference work Deiateli Revolutsionnogo dvizheniia v Rossii.”
In 1892, Ethel Voynich married Wilfrid Michael Voynich, an antiquarian book dealer. He died in 1930.