Ethel Lilian Voynich , born Boole (May 11th 1864, County of Cork, Ireland - July 27th 1960, New York City) is a auteure, musician and suffragette of various movements Socialist. His/her father is celebrates it mathematician George Boole and its maternal great-uncle is the geographer George Everest. She marries in 1893, the revolutionist and later bibliophile Wilfrid Mr. Voynich which is the éponyme Manuscrit of Voynich.

The Gadfly

She is especially famous for her novel The Gadfly ( the Horsefly or MoucheCheval ), published in 1897 with the the United States (June) and with the the United Kingdom (September) and which describes the fight of a revolutionist in Italy. This novel is very known in Soviet Union where it becomes a Best seller and almost an obligatory reading, like in China for reasons more ideological than literary. It is estimated that the sales of his books, for the only Soviet Union amount to 2.500.000 of copies at the time of his death.

In 1955, the Russian Aleksandr Fajntsimmer adapts this novel to the cinema under the same title (in Russian: Ovod ). The Type-setter Dmitri Chostakovitch writes the music of it ( The Gadfly - Opus N ⁰ 97).

According to the historian Robin Bruce Lockhart, Sidney Reilly — an Adventurous and Secret agent born in Russia, with the service of the Secret Intelligence British Service — Ethel Lilian in London in 1895 met. They became lovers for short a period and travelled to Italy together. It would be during this voyage that Reilly “would have been exposed” and would have revealed to him the history of its strange youth in Russia. After this connection was finished, Ethel Lilian made use of this history to write The Gadfly . However, Andrew Cook, a biographer of Reilly, rejects this romantic version of the events and suggests rather than Reilly was near the young woman to follow, on behalf of the services of information British, the revolutionary and radical activities of auteure and returned accounts to William Melville of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch.

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