This is not quite a book review. Instead it is adjacent to a book review, because the surrounding stories attached to the book are what I am interested in here. But you do have to know something about the book first so here goes.

The Gadfly was written by Ethel Voynich and published in 1897. It is set in the 1830s in Italy when that country was struggling with independence from Austria. Italy was, at that time, fragmented into various Papal States and other entities that would one day unite into the country we see today, but then it was a nest of spies and revolutionaries.

The story is about one of those revolutionaries, known as the Gadfly, who specialises in writing provocative pamphlets, something you could be arrested for and perhaps executed for. Despite the backdrop it is a very personal story. The Gadly is tortured by his past and his current illnesses. And this is surprising when you learn how the book came about.

It came about because Ethel Voynich met a man called Sidney Reilly in 1895 in Florence.

Sidney Reilly is a name you may have heard of but if you haven't I can sum him up by quoting Ian Flemming talking about his creation James Bond, where he said "He's no Sidney Reilly." The implication is that Reilly was the real thing where Bond is a fantasy. Reilly was a secret agent and something of a con man. He seems to have worked for different governments at different times, but he also lied an awful lot. Most of his career happened after Voynich wrote her book so she could only focus on his very early career. Unlike James Bond, who saves the country or the entire world on a regular basis, Reilly made no difference to world affairs although at times he did make a lot of money. He was eventually shot by the Russians.

What Reilly told Voynich about himself is that he faked his own death in Odessa, stowed away on a ship to Brazil, had many adventures in which he was inevitably the hero, and made a lot of money in the process, then went to Europe.

Voynich wove this into her story of The Gadfly adapting it to an English protagonist living in Italy. It is not really a spy story at all, but it is intriguing at a personal level.

I should add that Reilly often claimed to be Irish, so Voynich would have had no qualms about adjusting his origins for the story. The book was written in English by an English author, but it was wildly popular in Russia. It seems they knew it was connected with Reilly and liked the revolutionary sentiments in the story. They adapted it for plays, movies and even ballet. One of the movies had a score by Shostakovich. The score was later adapted into a piece of music called The Gadfly Suite and when the TV series Reilly: Ace of Spies was made they used The Gadfly Suite as the theme music.

That's enough about Reilly, there is more about Ethel Voynich.

She was Mrs Voynich. Her maiden name was Boole. Have you heard of Boolean Logic? If you're a programmer you may recognise bool or boolean data types that can only take the values true or false. Well that was Ethel's father George Boole. He also made contributions to calculus and probability.

Ethel's mother was also a mathematician and an educator and, apart from her own work, edited George's paper on Boolean Logic. Her uncle was George Everest, Surveyor General of India, after whom Mt Everest is named. Ethel was the youngest of five daughters all of whom had interesting careers or married someone who did. Her sister Alicia was into four dimensional geometry and another sister, Lucy, was the first female professor of chemistry in England. So they were quite the family, but it doesn't stop there.

Ethel married Wilfrid Voynich who was Polish and enough of a revolutionary for the Russians to send him to Siberia in 1887. He managed to escape (though how one actually escapes from such a place is worth finding out) and got to London where he furthered his revolutionary activities. It seems London at that time had a community of Russian (or near Russian) exiles discussing how to get rid of the Tsar. Reilly was part of that community too. Ethel had revolutionary ideas and seems to have fitted in well while not being anything like Russian, though being Irish probably helped.

Wilfrid Voynich gave up being a revolutionary in 1895 and got into selling antique books, doing very well at it. We're talking very old stuff, 11th and 12th century, and very valuable. He had a book shop in London and another in New York. His biggest claim to fame was the discovery of the Voynich manuscript (yes, it is named after him).

This is a curious manuscript written in an unknown script in the 15th century. So far none of the many attempts to decode the manuscript have convincingly worked though it has exercised many cryptographers and language experts ever since Voynich turned up with it in 1912.

Ethel married Wilfrid Voynich in 1902 though they lived together from 1895, around the time she met Reilly.

It seems like if you tried to work up all this into a work of fiction it would be labelled completely unrealistic and straining credibility. But you can find it all on Wikipedia, though you have to follow the links to get the details (and maybe read the book).

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