1. Ethel Lilian Voynich was an Irish-born novelist and musician, and a supporter of several revolutionary causes.
18 Facts About Ethel Voynich
1. 2.
Ethel Voynich was born in Cork, but grew up in Lancashire, England.
3.
Ethel Voynich is best known for her novel The Gadfly, which became hugely popular in her lifetime, especially in the Soviet Union.
4.
Ethel Voynich Lilian Boole was born on 11 May 1864, at Lichfield Cottage, Blackrock, Ballintemple, Cork, the youngest daughter of English parents, mathematician George Boole, and mathematician and educationalist Mary Everest, who was the niece of George Everest and a writer for Crank, an early-20th-century periodical.
5.
Ethel Voynich's father died six months after she was born.
6.
Ethel Voynich's mother returned to her native England with her daughters, and was able to live off a small government pension until she was appointed librarian at Queen's College, London.
7.
When she was eight, Ethel Voynich contracted erysipelas, a disease associated with poor sanitation.
8.
Ethel Voynich's mother decided to send her to live in Lancashire with her brother, who was manager of a coal mine, believing that it would be good for her health.
9.
Ethel Voynich became withdrawn, dressing in black and calling herself "Lily".
10.
In 1904, he anglicised his name to Wilfrid Michael Ethel Voynich and became an antiquarian book dealer.
11.
In 1897, Ethel Voynich published The Gadfly, which was an immediate international success.
12.
Ethel Voynich published three more novels, Jack Raymond, Olive Latham and An Interrupted Friendship, but none attained the popularity of her first book.
13.
Ethel Voynich concentrated more on music from this point on, working in a music school, but she continued her literary career as a translator from Russian, Polish and French.
14.
Ethel Voynich was unaware of the vast sales of The Gadfly in the Soviet Union until she was visited in New York by a Russian diplomat in 1955, who told her how highly regarded she was in the country.
15.
Ethel Lilian Voynich died on 27 July 1960 at the age of 96.
16.
Ethel Voynich is most famous for her first novel The Gadfly, first published in 1897 in the United States and Britain, about the struggles of an international revolutionary in Italy who was loosely based on the figure of Giuseppe Mazzini.
17.
Ethel Voynich joined the Society of Women Musicians during World War I After she and her husband moved to New York, she devoted herself much more to music, creating many adaptations and transcriptions of existing works.
18.
Ethel Voynich researched the history of music, compiling detailed commentaries on music of various eras.