Author and journalist Alannah Hopkin will present the story of a remarkable Cork woman Ethel Boole otherwise known as Ethel Lilian Voynich or E.L.V. at the Maldron Hotel on Thursday 30th July at 2pm.
Ethel Lilian Boole was born at Lichfield Cottage in Ballintemple, Cork on 11th May 1864 and baptised on 31st May at the nearby St Michael’s Church on Church Road. Just over six months later her father the renowned mathematician George Boole died in Lichfield on December 8th of that year. Her mother Mary Everest took her and her four sisters to London where she grew up, but came and went to Ireland. She lived for a time in Lancashire, England with her uncle Charles Boole who managed a coal mine.
In 1879, she spent a summer with her great uncle John Ryall (former Vice President of University College Cork) and developed an interest in the Italian political activist Giuseppe Mazzini from a book which she had read. She later studied music at the Berlin Hochschule fűr Musik.
Europe was in a ferment at the time and she became interested in the growing revolutionary movements in Russia. Lily spent two years traveling widely in Russia and witnessed the famine conditions of the peasants and workers. Deeply influenced by what she had seen she threw herself into the radical movements seeking to overthrow the Czar. She met up with Peter Kropotkin and Sergei Kravchinski (Stepniak) who had fled Russia where the later had assassinated Mezenter, the Tsarist Chief of Police.
Returning to London in 1889, along with Stepniak, she published a monthly magazine entitled Free Russia. Later she becoming active in the revolutionary socialist émigré milieu in London at the time, where she met Friedrich Engels, George Bernard Shaw, William Morris, Eleanor Marx, Edward Aveling and her own future husband Wilfred Michail Voynich who had earlier been imprisoned in the Warsaw Citadel. By an extraordinary coincidence, Voynich had actually seen Lily through the bars of his cell standing in the square outside on Easter Sunday 1887 during her trip to Warsaw.
Lily learned Russian with Stepniak and became a fluent speaker, she also had fluent Polish and worked as a translator in both languages. Her translation of Chopin’s letter from Polish remains the standard edition.
Deeply immersed in Russian politics, she returned clandestinely there in 1894. Stepniak died in 1895 in a train accident and she seems to have drifted away from politics, possibly disillusioned with the revolutionary movement.
It is claimed she had a brief and passionate love affair with Sydney Reilly (Sigmund Rosenblum) whose incredible life story is described in Ace of Spies, written by Robin Bruce Lockhart in 1967. Following her return from Florence to London she wrote her famous novel The Gadfly. The more existing adventures of the Gadfly seem however to be based on Stepniak’s autobiographical novel Andrei Kozhukhov.
The Gadfly tells the story of Arthur Burton and Gemma Warren and their exploits in revolutionary Italy. Named after an insect, the gadfly, which burrows under an animal’s skin and has a vicious bite, it was published to mixed reviews in New York in 1897. The book later became a publishing phenomenon in Russia and China with millions of copies being sold and translations into many languages. Widely read throughout Europe, its love interest, revolutionary setting, anti-clerical vein and espionage mystery thriller characteristics ensured its appeal. Even today, almost 120 years later it remains a somewhat fresh and vibrant if violent story.
Ethel wrote several other books and eventually joined her husband in New York in 1920. She lived quietly, teaching and composing music in New York after Wilfred died in 1930.
She enjoyed some late fame when Pravda ran a story in the mid-50s about her presence in New York. She passed away there on the 27th July 1960 at the age of 96.
For further information see The Life and Work of George Boole, A Prelude to the Digital Age by Professor Desmond MacHale. Republished by Cork University Press 2014.
Alannah Hopkin will tell the story of Lily Boole “From Lily Boole to E. L. Voynich, the making of the author of The Gadfly” at the Maldron Hotel during this year’s Spirit of Mother Jones Festival.
Ms Hopkin has published two novels A Joke Goes a Long Way in the Country and The Out-Haul. Her non-fiction books include Eating Scenery: West Cork, the People & Place as well as Inside Cork. She is a tutor on Poetry Ireland’s, Writers in Schools Scheme, and has led writing workshops for adults up to MA level. She is currently working on a new novel set in West Cork, The Ballydevlin Hauntings.
Updated on the 14th January 2026.
Lily Boole is rediscovered in Ireland and China.
On Monday January 5th 2026, Denis Staunton in the Irish Times reported from Beijing during a visit by Irish Taoiseach, Cork native Micheál Martin to China, that the President of China Xi Jinping had mentioned how the novel “The Gadfly” written by Cork born author Ethel Boole Voynich had sustained him and his family when they were exiled to rural China during the Cultural Revolution purges of the 60s.
In an extraordinary coincidence, Micheál Martin also announced that he had read the same book as a teenager and had been presented with a first edition of “The Gadfly” by an uncle of his and claimed that “it had also made a profound Impression on him”.
Set in revolutionary Italy in the early 19th century, “The Gadfly” with its violent story of anti-clericalism, its love affair between Emma and Arthur, its personal sacrifice for the sake of the revolution which includes the betrayal by Cardinal Montanelli of his son and hero of the novel Arthur Burton. The latter was tortured and executed as a result of the betrayal. The novel espoused revolutionary communist fervour, revenge and promoted ideas of the blood sacrifice for the sake of the cause.
The Gadfly has reached huge audiences in the Soviet Union and in China in the 130 years since first publication. While literary critics and activists are divided on the merits of the book, it is clear that it has been widely read elsewhere, if largely ignored in the city of the author’s birth. Indeed the author herself, although a rebel in her youth, has been virtually forgotten in the “Rebel City”.
Upwards of 10 million copies have been published (no one knows for sure as Lily Boole received no royalties up to the late 50s and then only a token payment from the Soviet Union), it most certainly makes her the largest published female author in this country.
The Gadfly inhabits a revolutionary world of tiny secret societies such as the Knifers and Red Girdles, regular assassinations, violence, the prolonged drama of gruesome executions and violent death. It details iconic Catholic Church ceremonies and the “dead world of priests and idols”, and becomes meshed with passionate political activities, potential love affairs and human loss.
A further irony is that the main inspiration for the novel was the spymaster Sydney Reilly, a lover of Ethel whom she met in London and eloped with to Italy. As stated earlier, some argue that violent elements of the revolutionary life of Sergei Stepniak, radical Russian of Ukrainian descent and then a member of the Hampstead discussion groups were also included by Ethel in the character Arthur Burton.
The Gadfly hero, Arthur Burton is known to millions and a hero to many communists and revolutionaries. Even in Ireland during the War of Independence, the book was discovered in the prison cell of Liam Mellows after he was executed during the Irish Civil War.
Strangely, it appears that Sydney Reilly with whom Ethel had a brief romantic fling in Italy was apparently a fervent anti communist who operated as a British spy to seek to undermine the Russian Revolution and even plotted with others at one stage to kill Lenin. Various writers have suggested that Reilly may have been the original spy inspiration for James Bond. Did a British spy carry out the ultimate deception on communists through the Gadfly? Following an eventful life, Reilly died in 1925.
Voynich herself confirmed that Gemma, the book’s heroine, was based on the life of Charlotte Mary Martin, lover of Prince Peter Kropotkin. Charlotte Mary Martin became a founder and an editor of an Anarchist newspaper Freedom in London and a prominent member of the Fabian Society. She married Arthur Wilson, a stockbroker. Charlotte was active in London’s socialist and anarchist circles in Hampstead of the 1890s. Among those who attended the meetings were Wilfrid Voynich, Ethel Boole and Sergei Stepniak.
While the north London Fabians based at Hampstead and later at rural Wildwood on Hampstead Heath were mainly a socialist and anarchist discussion group, they attracted many emigres from Russia and elsewhere. Their world view of revolution embraced wider European, Russian and even American revolutionary activism.
Following the Haymarket Incident in Chicago in May 1886 in which a number of policemen died following a bomb explosion at an anarchist meeting, the London Fabians sent a plea to release the four innocent anarchists afterwards hanged. This incident also had a huge impact on a young union activist Mary Jones, which she later recounted in her autobiography of Mother Jones.
The following year, Ethel Boole, also by now under the strong influence of Stepniak and hearing the stories of revolutionary events elsewhere, set off for St Petersburg at the age of twenty three, a journey which would change the course of her young life and lead to the publication of ‘The Gadfly’, a decade later.
The renewed publicity from the recent discussions in China where the leaders of China and Ireland discovered that they had read the same revolutionary novel, while they were teenagers, has once again resurrected interest in the amazing life of Ethel Lilian Boole. The fifth and youngest daughter of Mary Everest and George Boole, born on the Blackrock Road, close to the ancient village of Ballintemple in Cork City continues to inspire curiosity in unusual places and settings.
This recent story from China was covered extensively in Ireland and elsewhere by The Examiner, Evening Echo, Irish Times and many other social media outlets.
The editorial on the Irish Times January 10th 2026 entitled “The forgotten best seller” concluded,
” Literary fame is unpredictable and fickle, but this week’s encounter in Beijing offers a timely reminder that Ireland’s cultural influence has sometimes reached further than we know“
Alannah Hopkin during a talk on Sunday Miscellany on RTE Radio (Irish Radio) on 5 October, 2014 explained how the Chinese-born writer Yiyun Li, winner of the inaugural winner of the Frank O’Connor Award, attended the Cork International Short Story Festival. Yiyun Li, while in Cork insisted on visiting the birthplace of Lily Boole in Ballintemple to pay her respects. Ethel Boole’s personal items and correspondence are held in the UCC Library archives in Cork.
While many criticise the Gadfly as a literary novel it certainly has had many advocates such as Bertrand Russell, D H Lawrence, Frederick Engels, Danny Morrison and George Bernard Shaw. Xi Jinping and Micheál Martin are just the latest to publicly admit that they have been attracted by the extraordinary lure of the Gadfly.
The five daughters of George Boole and Mary Everest, Mary Ellen Boole (1856-1908), Margaret Boole (1858-1935), Alicia Boole (1860-1940) Lucy Boole (1862-1904) and Ethel (Lily) Boole (1864-1960) and their amazing achievements were detailed in “The Booles & the Hintons- two dynasties that helped shape the modern world” by Gerry Kennedy, published by the Atrium, an imprint of the Cork University Press 2016. Mr Kennedy is related to the Boole family and his publication with its photographs and accounts of the Booles is essential reading to appreciate the contribution of these five Cork women to society.