Ivor Gurney’s
Friends
Ethel
Voynich — ‘E. L. V.’
Revolutionary,
Novelist, Translator, Composer
Pamela
Blevins
Ivor
Gurney had become aware of Ethel Voynich
by the summer of 1913. In August, he
reported to Marion Scott that he had
‘actually condescended to read a lady-novelist.
Mrs. Voynich.’ He had made his way through
her 1910 novel An Interrupted Friendship,
which he found ‘without form and void,
but not uninteresting...’, to The
Gadfly, Voynich’s highly successful
1897 suspense novel. ‘...I read it very
carefully up to the capture of Felix,
and read the rest in 15 minutes. Why
ever did she lose grip in that way?
Why did - -? Why did - -? Would - -
- -? It is the kind of thing one would
write in cold gray dawns after a substantial
breakfast of cold beef steak pie and
porter,’ he wrote to Scott. ‘But it
really does strike me as an awfully
fine book, in spite of the characters
being non-attractive and a little puzzling.’(1)
At
the time he wrote these comments, Gurney
might not have been aware of how well
Scott knew Ethel Voynich personally
or that they had even been collaborators
on a theatrical production in Manchester
five years earlier.(2) He was soon to
learn that Mrs. Voynich, who became
one of his valued friends and an intellectual
sparring partner, was no ordinary woman.
Throughout
her life, she had known many cold gray
dawns, danger, fear, deprivation, and
uncertainty not unlike that of the characters
who peopled her novels. By the time
Ivor met Ethel Voynich she was nearly
fifty years old, working with her husband
Wilfred in his rare book shop in Soho
and composing music. Her arduous route
to London had taken her from Ireland
to Germany, Poland and Russia. Along
the way she met adventure and danger.
She would count spies, revolutionaries
and murderers among her close friends.
Born
in County Cork, Ireland on 11 May 1864,
Ethel Lilian Boole was the youngest
of the five daughters of George Boole
(1815-1864), and Mary Everest Boole
(1832-1916). George Boole was the eminent
mathematician whose theories (Boolean
Logic) set the stage for modern technology,
including digital recording and the
Internet. Mary Boole was a visionary
but eccentric woman, a mathematician,
teacher and writer whose books on teaching
mathematics to children were milestones
in education.(3)
Six
months after Ethel’s birth, George Boole
died unexpectedly at age forty-nine
from complications of a respiratory
infection. His sister believed that
the sometimes impractical Mrs. Boole
had hastened his death by foolishly
employing a ‘cold-water cure’, recommended
by a doctor, that required the ailing
man to lie between cold wet sheets.
Whatever the cause of his death, the
family were soon destitute. Mrs. Boole
returned to her native England. In the
days before welfare, she had no choice
but to send her daughters away to be
cared for by various relatives while
she attempted to find work, not a promising
prospect for a woman in 1865. She was
awarded a small Civil List pension of
one hundred pounds a year but it was
not enough to support herself and five
children.
Influential
friends rallied and she was appointed
librarian at Queen’s College, a women’s
college in London. She supplemented
her income by advertising herself as
a private tutor for girls in arithmetic,
algebra, analytical geometry, and differential
calculus. Eventually she taught mathematics
at Queen’s College. Mary Boole was a
woman ahead of her time who expressed
ideas that seemed alien to Victorian
minds. When she ran a boarding house
for students, she drew them into her
colourful and often brilliant thought
world. She eagerly and openly introduced
them to spiritualism, Judaism (she wrote
for Jewish publications), true logic
and psychology. She even encouraged
her boarders to work through personal
problems in encounter groups, something
unheard of in the pre-Freudian, pre-Jungian
1870s. She sometimes teetered on the
edge of mental instability. Ill health,
which ‘assumed the form of temporary
derangement’ forced her to resign her
post at Queen’s College in 1874.
Ethel
remembered the family’s acute poverty
but she also recalled a steady stream
of intellectuals, scientists, writers
and eccentrics flowing through the house,
their enlivening conversation and exchange
of ideas relieving her misery. When
Ethel was eight, she contracted erysipelas,
a bacterial skin infection known as
the ‘filth disease’ that in her day
was potentially fatal. It is likely
the Booles’ poor living conditions made
Ethel vulnerable. Mrs. Boole decided
that a change might do her youngest
daughter some good so she sent her off
to Lancashire to live with her brother
Charles, a mine manager, and his family.
It was a decision with unfortunate consequences.
Charles
Boole was a religious fanatic and a
sadist whose children lived in fear
of his frequent beatings. Although he
never beat Ethel, he found other ways
to abuse, bully and torment the child.
He cruelly used music — her passion
— as his instrument of abuse, forcing
young Ethel to sit at the piano and
play for hours while he pounded the
keys and made horrible faces. Boole
would falsely accuse her of stealing
or other alleged crimes. When she refused
to confess he would lock her alone in
her room for days or threaten to put
chemicals in her mouth to make her confess.
When her uncle realized that he could
not break her iron will, he had the
temerity to inform Mary Boole that Ethel
was a bad influence on his children.
Ethel had endured his cruelty for two
years. Soon after returning to London,
she suffered a nervous breakdown.
The
abuse her uncle heaped upon her scarred
Ethel but it did not destroy her. In
her 1901 novel, Jack Raymond,
Ethel relived her experiences through
her central character, a boy who is
ill-treated by his sadistic uncle. ‘Mrs.
Voynich evidently had something of an
obsession with physical pain,’ wrote
Arnold Kettle in 1957. ‘Disease, torture
and mutilation occur in her books with
a frequence for which there is not always
artistic justification and there is
a rather ghoulish tendency to hover
over descriptions of the extremities
of physical agony.’(4) Writing in 1904,
W. L. Courtney found the book ‘brutal
in its remorseless study of the lust
of cruelty’.(5)
Ethel’s
suffering gave her strength, endurance
and courage that would serve her well
in the dramatic adventures that were
to come. Years later she would say,
‘All my books are about mental shock’,(6)
Not
all of Ethel’s childhood and teenage
memories were clouded by misery. There
were bright spots among them including
happy holidays in Cornwall with Mrs.
Boole’s relatives which she recalled
in her last book, Put off thy shoes
(1945). In 1879, she returned to
Ireland to spend the summer with her
great uncle John Ryall, a classical
Greek scholar, and his wife. While there
she had a life-altering experience.
She read about Giuseppe Mazzini, the
Italian writer, politician and revolutionary,
whom she made her ideological hero.
The seeds for her own commitment to
revolutionary causes were sown then.
She now dressed in black and preferred
to be called ‘Lily’.
When
she received a small legacy at age eighteen,
Ethel decided to pursue the study of
her first love, music. It was a surprising
decision considering how Charles Boole
had used music to torment her. She journeyed
to Berlin to enroll in the Hochschule
der Musik where she studied piano and
composition for three years (1882-1885).
Philipp Spitta, the authority on J.
S. Bach, was one of her professors.
Friends recalled Ethel walking in Berlin
wearing her ankle-length black dress
hemmed with pins. They also recalled
her ‘extraordinary eyes, and halo of
gold hair’.(7)
In
Berlin, she became deeply interested
in the revolutionary causes of Russia
and Central Europe and in her readings
was impressed by Machiavelli’s The
Prince and Sergei Kravchinski’s
Underground Russia. After she
returned to England, she decided to
study the Russian language and asked
her friend Charlotte Wilson, an anarchist,
to recommend a teacher. Wilson introduced
Ethel to her new-found hero Sergei Kravchinski
(1852-1895), known as ‘Stepniak’. He
had fled to England after murdering
the chief of the Tzarist secret police
in 1878. En route to England, he had
taken part in revolts in Herzegovina
and Italy. From him, Ethel learned the
language rapidly. Her sister Lucy studied
with her and both women regarded Stepniak
as their guardian. Stepniak’s revelations
about the plight of the Russian people
under Tzarist rule moved Ethel so profoundly
that she decided to go there to see
for herself.
While
en route to St. Petersburg, she stopped
in Warsaw where, on Easter Sunday 1887,
she stood in the great square staring
in horror at the grim facade of the
city’s Citadel, which had become a prison.
The sight of this blond woman in black
intrigued a group of desolate prisoners
watching from a window. Remarkably one
of these men was to become her husband.
His name was Wilfred Michael Voynich,
a Polish nationalist, who was about
to be sent into exile in Siberia for
his role in planning the failed escape
of two political prisoners.
Ethel, by then fluent in Russian, settled
in St. Petersburg where she supported
herself working as a tutor and governess,
teaching English and music. She stayed
with Stepniak’s sister-in-law, Preskovia
Karauloff, a doctor whose husband, Vasili,
was in prison serving a four-year term
in solitary confinement for his political
activities. Ethel, knowing that bad
prison food was making Vasili sick,
managed to convince a general’s wife
to have her prepare food for him which
Ethel delivered to the prison. She was
never allowed to see Vasili and was
often kept waiting for hours. It was
during those long waits that she witnessed
firsthand the deplorable conditions
and inhumane treatment of prisoners.
She began asking questions and learned
that the cruelty endured by prisoners
extended to the treatment of their families.
Ethel was cautious, knowing that her
association with dissidents was dangerous
and potential cause for her own arrest.
The
injustice and extreme suffering of the
people that she saw fuelled Ethel’s
determination to help the Russians in
any way she could. She spent her first
summer with Preskovia helping her bring
medical care and other comforts to peasants
living in the area of Pskov (now in
Estonia), which was home to the Karauloff
family. The journey from St. Petersburg
took the women and Preskovia’s young
son three days of travelling by horse
and primitive cart to the wild lonely
area in the Pskov lake district. There
they found the peasants suffering from
tuberculosis and venereal disease, starving
and living in unimaginable filth. Ethel
acted as Preskovia’s nurse, knowing
that by helping Preskovia and the peasants
she was committing a crime.
The
following summer she worked briefly
as governess on an estate owned by the
widow of a chamberlain of the Tsar,
who was godfather to one of the children.
Ethel met the Tsar and reported that
they hated each other. She moved on
and spent the remainder of the summer
with friends at a manor house on the
Volga where she watched a total eclipse
of the sun. Before departing from St.
Petersburg on 24 May 1889, Ethel saw
her friend Preskovia and her son for
the last time. They also were leaving
to join Preskovia’s husband in exile
in Siberia. Ethel arrived back in London
pleased that she had successfully smuggled
a manuscript out of Russia for Stepniak.
Ethel
Lilian Boole had returned home a revolutionary.
She and Stepniak organised the Society
of Friends of Russian Freedom and she
helped edit their monthly magazine Free
Russia. Ethel began meeting other
revolutionaries, socialists, exiles
and writers, including Eleanor Marx,
the daughter of Karl Marx, Friedrich
Engels, Bernard Shaw, William Morris
and Oscar Wilde.(8) Stepniak’s home
was a way station for Russian political
refugees and escapees.
One
night towards the end of 1890 another
revolutionary entered her life, Wilfred
Michael Voynich. Their story reads like
the plot for a political mystery-spy-romance
thriller. In May 1887, shortly after
he had seen Ethel Boole outside the
Citadel, Voynich was sent to join other
political exiles at Irkutsk, Siberia,
near the Mongolian border. Earlier he
had been involved in a plot to free
two political prisoners being held at
the Citadel. The plot was exposed by
a traitor among them. Voynich, who had
befriended an official, a Lieutenant
Colonel Bielanowski to gain information,
and his co-conspirators were arrested.
His partners and the men they sought
to free were hanged. Voynich, on order
of the official he had betrayed, was
sent to a cell facing the gallows so
he could watch his friends die. He remained
in prison in a cell so cramped that
‘one shoulder became permanently lower
from hunching up’. He contracted tuberculosis.
Voynich also carried scars from ‘bullet’
and ‘sword’ wounds.(9) Voynich had told
Bielanowski that he wanted to see his
mother before he left for Siberia. When
Mrs. Voynich arrived at the Citadel,
Bielanowski told her that her son had
been shot. She fainted and Bielanowski
had Voynich brought in to see his mother
unconscious on the floor. Such sadistic
treatment of family members was common.
In
Irkutsk, he met Preskovia and Vasili
Karauloff who convinced him that he
must escape to England. Preskovia wrote
Stepniak’s name and address on a piece
of paper along with the name ‘Lily Boole’,
asking Voynich to greet her for them.
Voynich escaped twice but was re-captured
both times. He succeeded on his third
attempt. As the story goes, he made
his way to Mongolia where he joined
a caravan and spent months wandering
with them until he reached Peking. From
there he made his way to Hamburg, Germany,
where he sold his coat and glasses to
buy some herring and bread and pay for
a third class ticket on a fruit boat
bound for England. After a treacherous
journey during which the boat ran aground
and lost its cargo, Voynich arrived
at the London docks hungry, dirty, without
any money and speaking no English. He
started walking along Commercial Road
showing the piece of paper with Stepniak’s
name and address to passers-by. A Jewish
student who understood Russian brought
him to Stepniak.
After
Voynich had eaten, bathed and dressed
himself in Stepniak’s ill-fitting clothes
he was introduced to Ethel Boole. ‘Haven’t
I seen you before?’, he asked. ‘Weren’t
you standing in the square near the
prison fortress on Easter Sunday 1887?’
She confirmed that she was and he replied,
‘I was inside, and I looked out and
saw you.’(10) Ethel and Wilfred worked
together with Stepniak printing and
sending to Russia revolutionary literature
and forbidden books, including translations
of Marx’s and Engels’ writings. With
other dissidents they formed the Russian
Free Press Fund. Voynich adopted the
pseudonym Ivan Klecevsky.
By
1895, Ethel and Wilfred Voynich were
living together seemingly as man and
wife. She had adopted his name earlier.
She now identified herself as E. L.
V., the moniker by which Gurney, Marion
Scott and others knew her. The Voyniches
did not marry until 1902 and then perhaps
only to insure the success of Voynich’s
application for citizenship in 1904.(11)
Ethel’s
writing, particularly her descriptions
of nature, had always impressed Stepniak
who encouraged her to ‘observe the characters
of human beings and the phenomena of
human life’ as she did nature. While
some credit him with influencing her
to write, she had already written two
short stories, In a German Concert
Hall and A Winter Dreamer
and had begun a novel long before she
met Stepniak. She turned her attention
to translating both classical and modern
Russian writers as well as Ukranian
and Russian folk songs into English.
Her first book, as Ethel Voynich, was
Stories from Garshin, which appeared
in 1893. It was followed, in 1895, by
The Humour of Russia, one of
a series of books on humour from a dozen
nations.(12)
In
between the publication of her two books,
Ethel made a dangerous clandestine visit
to L’Vov in the Ukraine to organise
the smuggling of illegal publications
into Russia. She made new contacts.
After she returned to England, Stepniak
was killed in a rail accident in December
1895.
Sometime
later, the Voyniches met another Russian
exile, Sigmund Rosenblum, who eventually
became known as Sidney Reilly. History
would remember him as Reilly, Ace of
Spies. According to legend, he and Ethel
ran away to Italy where they carried
on a passionate affair. After he opened
his heart and told her the details of
his background and adventures, he supposedly
abandoned her in Florence. She returned
to her husband [who, in fact, was not
yet her husband], and began writing
The Gadfly inspired by Reilly’s
life.
That’s
the legend. The facts tell a different
story. Reilly was not who or what he
claimed to be. He manufactured the details
of his early life to explain much later
(1918/19) how he was recruited to British
Intelligence. ‘The truth is that the
story of Arthur Burton [the main character
in The Gadfly] was the basis
for the creation of the fictitious Sidney
Reilly rather than the reverse,’ according
to Reilly’s biographer Andrew Cook.(13)
Reilly also dipped into Ethel Voynich’s
1910 novel An Interrupted Friendship
to borrow more ideas in plotting his
own fictionalized version of his life.(14)
Ethel
had actually conceived the idea for
The Gadfly in 1885/86, when Reilly
was only about eleven or twelve years
old, and had started writing the story
in 1889. By the time she met Reilly,
her novel was nearly completed. It was
published first in New York in June
1897 and then in England in September.
Fearing that the book’s anti-clerical,
political and love themes along with
its graphic depictions of brutality
and death might trouble Victorian minds
and unleash harsh criticism, the publisher,
Heinemann, decided to test reaction
by bringing the book out first in the
United States. The critics were divided.
Joseph Conrad said ‘I don’t ever remember
reading a book I disliked so much.’
Bertrand Russell declared it to be ‘one
of the most exciting novels I have ever
read in the English language.’(15) Other
admirers of the novel included Jack
London, Rebecca West and D. H. Lawrence.
The public loved it and it became a
best-seller. The Gadfly was also
published in Russia where it was greeted
with acclaim and where it was hailed
as a classic, a fact Ethel learned many
years later.
Some
sources claim that the Voyniches ceased
their revolutionary activities after
Stepniak’s death. Again the facts tell
a different story. Wilfred began playing
a more covert role in the Society of
Friends of Russian Freedom. He began
dealing in rare books and manuscripts,
a seemingly innocuous profession; however,
his London bookshop was a front for
smuggling the society’s books and propaganda
into Russia and for raising and laundering
revolutionary funds. Both British and
Russian authorities were aware of his
operation because someone close to him,
possibly Reilly, was a traitor. Ethel
Voynich travelled abroad regularly,
serving as a courier for the organization.
By
all accounts, Wilfred Voynich was a
brilliant man whose ‘seductive’ personality,
facility with languages, wide-ranging
knowledge, and keen entrepreneurial
skills made him a highly successful
book dealer. Voynich might have owed
his continued success more to his knowledge
as a chemist than to his other skills
and personality. Born at Kovno, Lithuania
on 31 October 1865 of Polish parents,
he graduated from Moscow University
with a degree in chemistry and was a
licensed pharmacist. Not long after
he opened his shop he began finding
previously unknown rare manuscripts.
He was said to have acquired supplies
of unused medieval paper from Europe
and to have used ‘his knowledge as a
chemist to replicate medieval inks and
paints, thus enabling him to create
"new" medieval manuscripts
to order’.(16) Readers’ tickets from
the British Museum Library reveal that
his associate Sydney Reilly had presented
himself as a ‘chemist and physicist’
interested in the study of medieval
art.(17) Among the books that he studied
were Some observations on ancient
inks and A Booke of secrets,
shewing divers waies to make and prepare
all sorts of Inke and Colours. In
1912, Voynich ‘discovered’ a document
known today as ‘The Voynich Manuscript’,
a strange manuscript of uncertain origin
and meaning that has teased and puzzled
cryptographers for nine decades. It
made his name.(18)
Eventually
the Voyniches did cease their revolutionary
activities. Ethel turned her energy
to writing full time, producing three
more novels before Ivor Gurney met her:
Jack Raymond (1901), Olive
Latham (1904) and An Interrupted
Friendship (1910). Her translations
of Shevchenko and Lermontov were published
in 1911 by Elkins Mathews. At some point
in their marriage, the Voyniches unofficially
adopted a daughter Winifred Eisenhardt,
who later became Winifred Gaye.(19)
Ethel
Voynich and Marion Scott had known each
other long before Gurney met either
of them. Because the English speaking
community in St. Petersburg was relatively
small, there is every possibility that
Ethel knew members of Scott’s family
and had been encouraged to make herself
known to Marion’s parents after she
returned to England. Marion’s mother,
Annie Prince Scott, had been born of
American parents in St. Petersburg,
where she was reared. Ethel was ten
years younger than Marion’s mother and
thirteen years older than Marion. Given
Annie Scott’s close ties to Russia and
her advocacy of social reform, she might
well have supported the Society of Friends
of Russian Freedom and the Russian Free
Press Fund. Mrs. Scott had many relatives
living in Russia and her nieces and
nephews were all Russian citizens. Ethel
Voynich and Marion Scott also shared
a common interest in music. Ethel was
a member of the Society of Woman Musicians,
founded by Scott in 1911.
Despite
the early death of their father and
the disruption of their childhood, Ethel
Voynich’s sisters led accomplished lives.
Alicia Boole, later Stott, (1860-1940)
inherited her father’s gift for mathematics.
Although she had little education and
no training in mathematics and worked
as a secretary, she nonetheless made
important discoveries in the field of
geometry. Lucy (1862-1905) studied chemistry
with the idea of working as a dispenser
or shop assistant in pharmacy. Instead
she became a lecturer and eventually
head of the chemical laboratories at
the London School of Medicine for Women,
a Fellow of the Institute of Chemistry,
and the first woman professor of chemistry,
it is believed, at the Royal Free Hospital
in London.(20)
Another
Boole sister, Margaret (1858-1935),
known as ‘Maggie’, had studied art and
married one of her teachers, Edward
Taylor, a landscape painter who made
a living designing and painting decorations
for large public rooms on passenger
liners. They settled among other artists
living in St. John’s Wood, where they
reared their two sons, Julian, a physician,
and Geoffrey, one of the most important
and influential mathematical physicists
of the twentieth century. Maggie Taylor
became another of Ivor Gurney’s close
friends and confidantes. He was a welcome
guest and occasional lodger in her home.
Gurney regularly referred to the Taylors
in his letters from the Front during
World War I. His friend Sydney Shimmin
was close to both Mrs. Voynich and the
Taylors.
During
the early years of the war, when Gurney
and Voynich were corresponding, Ethel,
who despised war and violence, was a
social worker for the Quakers in London’s
East End. She was writing a new book
and devoting more time to composition.
When she showed ‘distinct signs’ of
making Ivor her ‘confidant as to her
new novel and cantata’, he informed
Shimmin that he was reluctant to become
involved, perhaps uncomfortable that
he might offend Mrs. Voynich with his
blunt honesty.(21)
After
he was discharged from the Army in October
1918, Gurney experienced a period of
instability that concerned his friends
who tried to help. Mrs. Voynich was
one of them. Shortly before Christmas
1918, he travelled to Cornwall for a
holiday with Mrs. Voynich, other members
of her family and their friends. During
his visit, he and Mrs. Voynich walked
on the moors discussing music and her
plans to compose a motet. On this holiday,
Ivor turned his mind to his own music,
composing the song ‘Desire in Spring’,
a setting of Francis Ledwidge’s verse
‘Twilight song’. His absorption in writing
the song nearly caused him to be trapped
atop the rocks at Gurnard Head by the
incoming tide. He was rescued by Mrs.
Voynich’s nephew Geoffrey Taylor and
his friend Adrian Boult. Before he left
Cornwall, Ivor thanked Mrs. Voynich
with a manuscript copy of ‘Desire in
Spring’.(22)
Wilfred
Voynich made his first voyage to New
York City in November 1914, crossing
the Atlantic on the Lusitania.
According to the New York Times,
Voynich settled in New York in 1915.
He had his office at Aeolian Hall on
42nd Street.(23) Ethel Voynich
is believed to have emigrated to New
York around 1920, however, the first
reference to her that I can find doesn’t
place her in the U.S. until 22 October
1922 when she arrived in New York City
on the Baltic in company with her husband
and Anne Nill, who managed the New York
office of his book business.
In
December of that year, Gurney, delusional
and incarcerated in Barnwood House,
Gloucester, wrote to Marion Scott expressing
concern for Mrs. Voynich: ‘I have seen
signs of her being tormented; please
protest as it is right to protest against
all torment.’(24) Apparently Gurney
also wrote some disquieting letters
directly to Mrs. Voynich. These letters
and her personal encounters with Gurney’s
illness disturbed her and were more
than she could cope with. She stopped
writing to him but continued to hear
news of him from Marion Scott.
Settled
in New York, Ethel turned her attention
to composition and produced a number
of cantatas, oratorios and orchestra
works, Babylon, Jerusalem,
Epitaph in Ballad Form (dedicated
to the Irish nationalist Roger David
Casement who was hanged at Pentonville
Prison on 3 August 1916) and The
Sunken City among them. She composed
some instrumental music as well as shorter
sacred works for performance at Pius
X School of Liturgical Music, Manhattanville
College of the Sacred Heart with which
she had a close association. She embarked
on an intensive analytical study of
music of all eras and from all countries
and kept voluminous research notes.
She studied orchestration. She taught
music. In a letter to an associate,
she described the effect she was aiming
for in one of her motets: ‘...the secret
whisper of grass on a still night...[it]
seems so elusive an image, but faint
ripples do pass that way over the tips
of the grass’.(25)
Wilfred
Voynich, his lungs damaged by tuberculosis
and heavy smoking, died in March 1930
at the age of sixty-four. The physical
hardships he had endured as a prisoner
in Poland and Siberia had compromised
his health. His long-time secretary-manager
Anne M. Nill became Ethel’s ‘companion’.
The two women lived together for thirty
years in an apartment at London Terrace
on West 24th Street in the
heart of Manhattan.(26) In 1931, Ethel’s
translation of Chopin’s letters was
published and remains in print today.
She published her final book, Put
off thy shoes in 1945 in the U.S.
(1946 in England). Every year she re-read
all of Shakespeare and Dickens and many
of the Russian classics. She never stopped
composing music.
By
the mid-fifties, Ethel’s health had
begun to deteriorate. She was complaining
of weakness and hardening of the arteries
although the latter does not seem to
have affected her mind. She was worried
that Anne Nill, now in her early sixties,
would not be able to continue working
at her job as Ethel became more dependent
on her. Then another page turned in
Ethel Voynich’s remarkable life.
In
1955, nearly sixty years after the publication
of The Gadfly, she learned that
she was a celebrity in the Soviet Union,
that her novel was regarded as a masterpiece
and that Soviet critics ranked her among
their choices for great modern writers
of English fiction in company with Mark
Twain, American novelist Theodore Dreiser
and Charles Dickens. These revelations
came about after Peter Borisov, who
was part of the Russian delegation to
the United Nations and admirer of Voynich,
decided to learn what had become of
her. He expected to find her grave but
instead he discovered her alive and
well in New York City. To Borisov it
was ‘like finding Mark Twain alive...For
us, she is a second God,’ he told a
reporter for Look, a then-popular
American magazine.(27) Borisov, his
wife and ten-year-old daughter were
the first Soviet citizens to visit her.
They regarded the meeting as such a
great honour that they spent three months
preparing for it.
Other
admirers were soon to follow including
six Soviet journalists who told her
about the extent of her fame. Shortly
after their visit, Pravda blazed
the headline ‘Voynich is living in New
York!’ over a three-column story. Fan
mail started to arrive from Russia.
Mrs. Voynich was stunned to discover
that she was so famous. She and her
novel were the subject of countless
doctoral dissertations. She was featured
regularly on the pages of popular magazines
in articles built largely on conjecture
since she had never spoken with anyone
in Russia about her life. After the
publication of The Gadfly in
1947 in Mongolia, where Wilfred Voynich
had once roamed in his quest for freedom,
she became the idol of teenagers there.
The
Gadfly had been a best-seller in
Russia for decades but Mrs. Voynich
had never received royalties. Authorities
estimated that by 1955, it had sold
two-and-a-half million copies. It had
been translated into the eighteen languages
of the Soviet Union and had gone into
ninety printings. The Russians sent
her a complete set of her book in each
of the eighteen languages. Further,
she was told that it had been translated
into Chinese and had sold 700,000 copies
in China. After the Russian journalists
wrote about her and cut through some
of the political barriers that separated
the United States and the Soviet Union,
Mrs. Voynich learned that the Russians
were thinking about paying foreign royalties.
A United Nations lawyer wrote a letter
of inquiry to the Russian ambassador
to the U.N. which Mrs. Voynich signed.
Two weeks later she received a check
for $15,000, a small fortune at a time
when a new home in America cost about
$13,000.(28)
The
Gadfly lived in other art forms
including two films, one a 1956 version
with music by Dmitri Shostakovich, and
an opera produced in time to celebrate
the fortieth anniversary of the Russian
Revolution in 1957.(29) The Russians
were considering a performance of her
cantata, The Submerged City for
the Bolshoi Theatre and plans were underway
to publish her other novels. She continued
to receive royalties. Russians visiting
New York City made pilgrimages to her
apartment to pay their respects.
Ethel
Voynich hoped that her new-found fame
would inspire better relations between
America and Russia. For a time it did.
She continued to lead an active intellectual
life until shortly before her death
on 28 July 1960 at the age of ninety-six.
Today, one hundred and seven years after
it was first published, The Gadfly
is still in print.(30)
Notes
1. Ivor Gurney
to Marion Scott, 31 August 1913(O) CL,
pp. 8-9.
2. Actress
Janet Achurch presented a stage version
of Lermontov’s dramatic poem The
Song of Kalashnikov. Voynich provided
the translation and Scott provided her
own arrangements of Russian folk-songs
that had never been heard in England.
She performed them off stage with her
string quartet.
3. Mary Everest
Boole was a niece of George Everest
for whom Mt. Everest is named. She was
born in Wickwar, Gloucestershire, the
daughter of Dr. Thomas Everest, a minister,
but spent her early years in France.
4. Arnold Kettle,
‘E. L. Voynich: A Forgotten English
Novelist’, Essays in Criticism, 1957
quoted in Desmond MacHale, George
Boole, His Life and Work, (Dublin:
Boole Press, 1985).
5. W. L. Courtney,
The Feminine Note in Fiction: Mrs.
Voynich, (London: Chapman and Hall,
Ltd, 1904), p. 171. Gurney’s perception
of flaws in The Gadfly corresponds
with those of Courtney who found ‘all
the last section full of the crudity
of undeveloped art, the work of some
clever young writer, inspired by the
pessimism which is the privilege of
youth...Nevertheless, two-thirds of
the "The Gadfly" is replete
with literary and dramatic skill from
which great things may be hoped...’.
(p. 164).
6. Anne Fremantle,
‘The Russian Best-seller’, History
Today, September 1975, p. 630. Fremantle’s
article provides no footnotes or sources
for her information. However, it does
appear that she knew Ethel Voynich so
some of the material she presents could
well have come directly from Mrs. Voynich.
7. Ibid.
8. Shaw adapted
The Gadfly to the stage in 1898.
9. Op. cit.
Fremantle.
10. Ibid.
11. Information
provided to the author by Andrew Cook.
12. In his
1985 biography of Voynich’s father George
Boole, author Desmond MacHale observes,
‘Russian humour of the Victorian era
is unlikely to provoke much laughter
nowadays’ and notes that Voynich’s book
has become a collector’s item.
13. Correspondence
between Andrew Cook and the author,
10 July 2004. According to Mr. Cook
it is not likely that Ethel Voynich
had an affair with Reilly since ‘anecdotal
family sources indicate that Ethel’s
sexual preferences may well have precluded
a romantic attachment to Rosenblum [Reilly],
or indeed any other man, come to that’.
(Andrew Cook, The Ace of Spies, the
True Story of Sydney Reilly, (Stroud,
Gloucestershire: Tempus 2004), p. 37.)
14. Robin Bruce
Lockhart, whose father Sir Robert Bruce
Lockhart had worked with Reilly, wrote
about the alleged affair in his book,
Reilly: Ace of Spies. (1967,
revised 1984) A 1968 article by Tibor
Szamuely, based on Lockhart’s account,
appeared in the June issue of The
Spectator. Boris Polevoy, one of
the journalists who first visited Mrs.
Voynich, and Eugenia Taratuta, who published
a 1960 biography of Ethel Voynich in
Russian, denied the story but later
claimed it was true. However, they also
believed the story of Reilly’s early
background. Polevoy had been an admirer
of Mrs. Voynich from the age of nine
when his parents gave him a copy of
the novel.
15. Laura Berquist,
‘A Best Seller in Russia, Look Magazine,
July 8, 1955, p. 69.
16. Andrew
Cook, The Ace of Spies, the True
Story of Sydney Reilly, (Stroud,
Gloucestershire: Tempus 2004, p. 38.
Rosenblum/Reilly was a consultant chemist
and a Fellow of the Institute of Chemistry
and the Chemical Society and ran a patent
medicine company.
17. Ibid.
18. Voynich
claimed that he found the strange manuscript
that now bears his name in the library
of Villa Mondragone, a Jesuit college
in Frascati, Italy. The 230-page document
is hand-written in an unknown alphabet
that scholars, including code-breakers
at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
in the United States, have not been
able to decipher. The coloured illustrations
depict unknown plants, astrological
diagrams, and naked women. A letter
dating from 1665 or 1666 and found inside
the book states that it once belonged
to Emperor Rudolf II of Habsburg, who
believed it had been written by the
English monk Roger Bacon (1214-1294?).
Some scholars believe that Edward Kelley,
the Englishman who allegedly sold the
manuscript to Rudolf II, may have created
it to bilk the king. The ‘language'
of the document even has its own name
now -- ‘Voynichese'. Scholars have called
it everything from an account of an
ancient civil war written in an ancient
form of Ukrainian to a medieval treatise
on the elixir of life to an ancient
prayer book to an alchemy book to a
sixteenth-century hoax to the work of
aliens to a hoax created by Voynich
himself. Personally I believe that the
document is a hoax created by Voynich.
Whether Ethel Voynich was aware of or
involved in the deception remains an
open question. Wilfred willed the manuscript
to Ethel. She willed it to her companion
Anne Nill, who sold it to Hans P. Kraus,
a New York book dealer in 1960 for $24,500
(about $169,000 or Ł93,000 today). Kraus
valued the document at $160,000 (over
a million dollars now) and attempted
for some years to sell it but no one
was interested. He donated it to the
Beinecke Library at Yale University
in Connecticut where it remains today
still teasing scholars. The July 2004
issue of The Scientific American
features a six page article, ‘The Mystery
of the Voynich Manuscript' and there
are dozens of Internet web sites devoted
to it.
19. In her will,
Mrs. Voynich made Mrs. Gaye her secondary
heir in the event that her primary heir
Anne M. Nill predeceased her. Mrs. Voynich
states in the will that Mrs. Gaye ‘who
though not legally adopted by me has
always been considered by me as a daughter’.
Mrs. Gaye had at least one son and was
living in Somerset in 1992.
20. Mary (1856-?),
the eldest Boole daughter, was the least
visible of her siblings. She married
Charles H. Hinton, a teacher, mathematician,
inventor and esoteric theorist whose
escapades as a bigamist landed him in
trouble with the law. Mary had taught
for a while in Japan and her accounts
of her experiences there show a flair
for writing. Lucy’s promising career
was cut short by her premature death
at the age of forty-three.
21. After Gurney’s
death in 1937, Marion Scott sent Ethel
a copy of the January 1938 issue of
Music and Letters featuring a
symposium on Ivor. Ethel wrote back
(4 March 1938) telling her that the
‘little motet’ that she had discussed
long ago with Gurney on a Cornwall moor
‘jumped out ready to be put on paper’
as soon as the Music and Letters
arrived.
22. Gurney to
Shimmin, early January 1917(KT), CL,
p. 180. Gurney’s last letter to Voynich
in the Collected Letters dates
from February 1917, but he continued
writing to her throughout the war and
after. Those letters might have been
lost or destroyed (Voynich told Scott
that she had destroyed some of her correspondence
when she moved to the U.S.). In the
Ethel Voynich collection at the Library
of Congress, I found a stiff brown,
tie-envelope folder that had once contained
Gurney’s letters to Voynich. The written
reference to them on the envelope has
been crossed out and they were not in
the folder nor were her copies of Severn
& Somme and War’s Embers,
also listed on the label. Either these
letters were moved to another file among
Ethel’s papers or she sent her extant
correspondence with Gurney to Marion
Scott who included them with the material
now in the Gurney Archive. Other items
relating to Gurney or items in his own
hand were still in the folder. Based
on new leads about Voynich’s life, I
am pursuing this matter further on the
off-chance that more Gurney letters
as well as Marion Scott letters might
be found. Ethel Voynich and Maggie Taylor
knew the details of Gurney’s relationship
with Nurse Annie Drummond, which Gurney
tried to keep from Marion Scott.
23. In February
1924, George Gershwin premiered his
Rhapsody in Blue at Aeolian Hall.
24. Gurney to
Scott, December 1922(KT), p. 553.
25. Ethel Voynich
to Carl Engel, 24 March 1925, Carl Engel
Collection, Library of Congress.
26. Anne Margaret
Nill was born in Buffalo, New York in
1894. Some sources suggest that Wilfred
Voynich and Anne Nill, had started working
together as early as 1914 and that she
had travelled with him to the United
States then. However, Nill was an American
citizen and it appears that she began
her association with Wilfred Voynich
in New York City around 1921, not in
London and not earlier. Voynich maintained
offices in both New York and London
until his death.
27. Op. cit.
Berquist.
28. Today $15,000
in royalties would be worth about $103,000
or about Ł57,000.
29. The theme
music for the popular television series,
Reilly: Ace of Spies was adapted
from ‘The Romance’ from Shostakovich’s
1956 film score for The Gadfly.
30. The most
recent figures I have been able to find
about sales of The Gadfly in
Russia date from the mid-1970s. By then
it had been translated into twenty-two
languages in 107 editions and had sold
over five million copies. In the 1970s
and perhaps even now, The Gadfly
was required reading in the seventh
grade throughout Russia. It was estimated
that over 250 million teenagers had
read the book by the mid-seventies.
Mrs. Voynich continues to intrigue the
Russians. There are at least a half
dozen web sites about her in Russian
on the Internet.
Bibliography
George Batchelor,
The Life and Legacy of G. I. Taylor,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996).
Laura Berquist,
‘A Best Seller in Russia’, Look Magazine,
July 8, 1955, pp. 68-70.
City News,
‘Miss Achurch Recital’, 6 May 1908.
Andrew Cook,
The Ace of Spies, the True Story of
Sidney Reilly, (Stroud, Gloucestershire:
Tempus, 2004).
W. L. Courtney,
The Feminine Note in Fiction: Mrs.
Voynich, (London: Chapman and Hall,
Ltd, 1904).
Daily Dispatch,
‘Miss Achurch’s Company in a Tragedy’,
May 7, 1908.
Anne Fremantle,
‘The Russian Best-Seller’, History
Today, September 1975.
Ivor Gurney
Collected Letters, Edited by R.
K. R. Thornton, (Ashington & Manchester:
Mid/NAG.Carcant. 1991).
Desmond MacHale,
George Boole, His Life and Work,
(Dublin: Boole Press, 1985
Manchester
Courier, ‘Miss Janet Achurch’s Recital
-- "The Song of Kalashnikov"’,
6 May 1908.
Manchester
Guardian, ‘A New Play’, 6 May 1908.
-- ‘The Song
of Kalashnikoff’, 6 May 1908.
New York
Times, ‘Ethel L. Voynich, Novelist,
Was 96’, 29 July 1960, p. 25.
-- ‘W. M. Voynich
Dies; Noted Bibliophile’ 20 March 1930,
p. 27.
Other Sources
Correspondence
with Andrew Cook, Dr. Barbara Garlick,
Dr. Desmond MacHale.
Cunard Line,
passenger records.
Ellis Island
New York, immigration records.
Ivor Gurney
Archive, Gloucester, England.
Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C.
University College,
Boole Archive, Cork, Ireland
Various Internet
sites about Wilfred Voynich and the
Voynich Manuscript.
Ethel Voynich
Will, County of New York.
I am most grateful
to Andrew Cook and Dr. Desmond MacHale
who so generously shared information
with me.
