Life
1864-1960 [née Ethel Lilian Boole]; b. and brought up in Cork,
dg. George Boole (1815-64), of Boolean mathematics fame, and Mary Everest
Boole, a feminist writer; self-taught scholar from Yorkshire and Professor
of Maths Queen’s College, Cork (UCC); neice of Himalayas explorer
Everest; ed. in Ireland and Berlin; knew Wilde and Shaw in London; travelled
in Russia; m. in 1891 Count Wilfrid Mikhail Voynich (1865-1930), an escapee
from Siberia, who introduced her to revolutionary European politics and
claimed to have seen her previously standing outside Warsaw Citadel where
he was held; worked for Free Russia; had affair with Sydney Reilly,
a British spy (orig. Sigmund Rosenblum); issued Stories from Garshin
(1893); published The Gadfly (1897), a highly romantic yet realistic
treatment of risorgimento period in Italy concerning the activities of
the international republican agent Arthur Burton who successfully eludes
the Austro-Hungarian policy and contributes to the revolutionary cause
culminating in the Italian uprising of 1848; sold 2,500,000 copies world-wide
and an additional 5 million in Russian; issued a sequel, An Interrupted
Friendship (1910); gave up writing for music in 1911 but returned
to the theme with Put Off Thy Shoes (1945), concerning her heroine’s
early life in Cornwall; other works incl. An Interrupted Friendship,
Olive Latham, Frank Raymond; she encouraged young writers incl. Ivor
Gurney who stayed with her in Cornwall; lived mostly in New York after
1916. NCBE DIW OCEL SUTH APPL
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Works
The Gadfly (London: Heinemann 1897); P. J. Kavanagh, ed., Letters,
ed. (OUP 1982); [?] Thornton Selected Letters (Carcanet 1990) [BL
7].
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Criticism
Arnold Kettle, ‘E. L. Voynich: Forgotten English Novelist’,
in Essays in Criticism, 7 (1957).
Robin N. Bruce Lockhart, Ace of Spies (London: Hodder & Stoughton 1967).
Elaine Showalter, A Literature of their Own (1984).
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Notes
Bruce Harkness, Conrad’s The Secret Agent: Texts and
Contexts’, Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society Vol. 4, no.
3 (Feb. 1979), pp.2-11, relates that Joseph Conrad wrote to Edward Garnett
of The Gadfly, ‘I don’t remember reading a novel I disliked
so much.’ (Letter of 11 Oct. 1896). [See further discussion, infra.]
Bruce Harkness writes in response to discussion of Irish references in Conrad: ‘Concerning possible sources of Vladimir in The Secret Agent, I had written to E. L. Voynich and she kindly replied from New York where she was the living, February 14, 1958, and I quoted her at some length in my talk and give a tiny bit here. [She replied:] ‘I have jut reread ‘The Secret Agent’ to refresh my memory of it [said Mrs. Voynich]. After my novel The Gadfly had been published by Heinemann in 1897 I was informed by Mr. Pawling of that firm that Conrad had expressed the wish to meet me. (The Nigger of the Narcissus had been published by Heinemann in the same year.) I responded very warmly because I so much admired his work (I still admire it greatly). Some time later Mr. Pawling found himself in the embarrassing position of having to tell me that Conrad had decided he did not like The Gadfly and therefore was no longer interested in meeting me. / Curiously enough, this distressing experience was suddenly recalled to my mind about two years ago when a writer friend told me, as a rather amusing detail, that in the course of her researches on the 1890"s in England she had just come across a statement Conrad had made about ‘The Gadfly’: '"a very bad book; I read it four times." Just where this reference occurs I [E. L. Voynich] do not know.’ Harkness confesses he doesn’t know either, but reflects on the amazing popularity of the novel. [ModBrits E-List, 22 Sept. 1996.]
G. B. Shaw produced a dramatised version of The Gadfly in 1898, according to Richard J. Finneran in Anglo-Irish Literature: A Review of Research (1976). There is a Russian film with a musical score by Dmitri Shostokovich [BBC3].
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)