FROM THE ARCHIVES:Six years after her death in New York in 1960, RM Fox remembered Ethel Lillian Boole, a Cork-born writer who was hugely successful in the young Soviet Union with her novel, The Gadfly. - JOE JOYCE
IRISH WRITERS have made a considerable contribution to English literature but there is one Irish novelist, E. L. Voynich, who is almost forgotten and has never been recognised as an Irish writer. Yet in a comment in the New York Times Book Review(May 31st, 1957) readers were told her first novel "The Gadfly" has had the distinction of selling 2,500,000 copies since it was published by Heinemann in 1897. Harvey Breit [ NYT Book Revieweditor] stated that, in the Russian Soviet Survey, E. L. Voynich was described as "the greatest living writer in the United States today". Her books, he added, were enjoying an unprecedented boom in Russia and China.
When I first saw the name “E. L. Voynich” I thought this writer must be Polish or Russian. Actually the name hides the personality of Ethel Lillian Boole, youngest of five daughters of George Boole, first Mathematics Professor at Queen’s University, Cork [and inventor of Boolean logic]. She was born in that city, married the Polish Count Voynich and wrote “The Gadfly”. The only literary recognition she has received in her own country is that the book was placed on the banned list of publications some 50 years after it appeared.
“The Gadfly” is a novel with a background of the Young Italy movement. The chief character, known as the Gadfly, takes a leading and tragic part in the movement, facing a firing squad at the end. E. L. Voynich had the determined melancholy of the Yellow Book period and writes with the poignancy of youth. The book was a success and was reprinted in three months. Then it came out in a red-backed Nelson sevenpenny series. Her next book “An Interrupted Friendship” had much the same set of characters but with an even deeper note of bitter desolation. She then wrote “Olive Latham”, a tale of the Polish national struggle, which is a story of suffering, dejection and defeat. In “Frank Redmond” – which followed – she writes of a musical genius who ruins the life of a girl, the sister of his best friend. In all these books humanity never gets a chance. Her highly pitched emotional style attacks the nerves of her readers. She is one of the saddest writers of the Gay Nineties.
In sharp contrast to her own mournful writing she edited a big volume entitled “Russian Wit and Humour” which belongs to the days before the Russian Revolution. Some 50 years after “The Gadfly”, when she was living in New York, her last book was published in America. This was called “Put Off Thy Shoes” and was disappointing for it had her early mannerisms which had grown stiff and old-fashioned. The book received little notice.
[W]hen I read [“The Gadfly”] many years ago I found it an authentic period piece, with a temperamental pessimism which may have been intensified by the mixture of Cork mathematics and Polish nationalism.
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