This passage of Voynich’s novel captures why the book was so popular in the early stages of China’s Cultural Revolution, with its veneration of youth and its anti-clerical celebration of iconoclasm:

“Padre, come away with us! What have you to do with this dead world of priests and idols? They are full of the dust of bygone ages; they are rotten; they are pestilent and foul! Come out of this plague-stricken Church – come away with us into the light! Padre, it is we that are life and youth; it is we that are the everlasting springtime; it is we that are the future! Padre, the dawn is close upon us – will you miss your part in the sunrise?”

Yet as the Cultural Revolution progressed, and the cult of Mao deepened, the rebellious Gadfly was suppressed, for fear it would be turned against the father figure of modern China. When the novel was re-released in the late 1970s, after Mao’s death, it resonated with those whose faith in China’s ‘Cardinal’ had waned.

Fly in the ointment

The melodrama of Voynich’s novel is matched by the extraordinary story of her own life. Ethel was born in Cork to parents George Boole, an eminent mathematician, and the philosopher Mary Everest, whose uncle gave his name to the world’s highest mountain. At the age of 15, Ethel read about the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini. She longed for his “melancholy beauty and distinction”, and until the day she married, dressed in black to “mourn the state of the world”.