Ethel Lilian Voynich (née Boole; 11 May 1864 – 27 July 1960) was an Irish-born novelist and musician, and a supporter of several revolutionary causes.

Ethel Lilian Boole was born on 11 May 1864, at Lichfield Cottage, Blackrock, Ballintemple, Cork,[1] the youngest daughter of English parents, mathematician George Boole (inventor of Boolean logic), and mathematician and educationalist Mary Everest,[2] who was the niece of George Everest and a writer for Crank, an early-20th-century periodical.

Her 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.

Her mother decided to send her to live in Lancashire with her brother, who was manager of a coal mine,[5] believing that it would be good for her health.

Described as "a religious fanatic and sadist",[4] who regularly beat his children, he apparently forced Ethel to play the piano for hours on end.

With Kravchinski she founded the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom, and helped to edit Free Russia, the Narodniks's English-language journal.

[6] 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.

According to the British journalist Robin Bruce Lockhart, Sidney Reilly – a Russian-born operative employed by the émigré intelligence network of Scotland Yard's Special Branch – met Ethel Voynich in London in 1895.

[7] In 2004, writer Andrew Cook suggested that Reilly may have been reporting on Voynich and her political activities to William Melville of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch.

[9] She is most famous for her first novel The Gadfly, first published in 1897 in the United States (June) and Britain (September), about the struggles of an international revolutionary in Italy who was loosely based on the figure of Giuseppe Mazzini.

Not only did it circulate widely among socialists in Russia, it appealed enormously to people of progressive ideas elsewhere with soaring popularity in Britain towards the end of the First World War.

Reilly, in turn, was used by Ian Fleming as a model for James Bond, the most famous fictional spy of the Cold War.

[11] The 1955 film of the novel, by the Soviet director Aleksandr Fajntsimmer is noted for the fact that composer Dmitri Shostakovich wrote the score (see The Gadfly Suite).

While there she composed a number of cantatas and other works that were performed at the college, including Babylon, Jerusalem, Epitaph in Ballad Form and The Submerged City.