Etel Voynich

Ethel Lillian Voynich was an English writer and composer, the daughter of the prominent English scholar and mathematics professor George Boole, and the wife of Mikhail Wilfrid Voynich.

She in fact did not know her father, as he died shortly after her birth. Her mother, Mary Everest (Eng. Mary Everest), was the daughter of a professor of Greek. Their surname is quite well known in the world, because it is the name of the highest mountain peak in the Himalayas, named after Mary Everest’s uncle, Sir George Everest. Her mother, in poverty, raised her five daughters, so when the youngest, Ethel, reached the age of eight, she took her to her husband’s brother, who worked as a quartermaster at a mine. He was a very religious and stern man. In 1882, Ethel received a small inheritance and began studying music at the Berlin Conservatory as a pianist. In Berlin she also attended lectures by Slavic studies scholars at the university. After coming to London, she attended meetings of political émigrés, among whom was the Russian writer Sergey Kravchinsky (pen name: Stepniak). He told her a great deal about his homeland, Russia. Ethel developed a desire to visit this mysterious country, which she realized in 1887. She worked in Russia for two years as a governess and as a teacher of music and English in the Venevitinov family.

In 1890 she married M. V. Voynich, a Belarusian writer and bibliophile who had moved to England after escaping from Siberian exile (he is known as the discoverer of the Voynich Manuscript). Ethel Voynich was a member of the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom and the Free Russian Press Fund, which criticized the tsarist regime in Russia.

Impressed by conversations with the Russian writer Kravchinsky, as well as by biographies she had read of the great Italian patriots Giuseppe Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini, Voynich created the image and character of the hero of her book, Arthur Burton, who is also called The Gadfly in the book. The famous ancient Greek philosopher Socrates had the same pseudonym. Writer Robin Bruce Lockhart (whose father Bruce Lockhart was a spy), in his adventure book King of Spies, claimed that Voynich