Ethel Voynich
Ethel Lilian Voynich, née Boole (May 11, 1864, County Cork, Ireland - July 27, 1960, New York City) was a novelist and musician, and a supporter of several revolutionary causes. Her father was the famous mathematician George Boole. She was married to Wilfrid Michael Voynich who is the eponym of the Voynich manuscript.
She is most famous for her novel The Gadfly, first published in 1897 in the United States (June) and Britain (September), about the struggles of an international revolutionary in Italy. This novel was very popular in the Soviet Union and was the top best seller and compulsory reading there, and was seen as ideologically useful; for similar reasons, the novel has been popular in the People's Republic of China as well. By the time of Voynich's death The Gadfly had sold an estimated 2,500,000 copies in the Soviet Union.
In 1955, the Soviet director Aleksandr Fajntsimmer adapted the novel into a film of the same title (Russian: Ovod). Composer Dmitri Shostakovich wrote the score (see The Gadfly Suite). The Romance, a segment from this composition, along with some other excerpts, has since become very popular.