The Gadfly

Living quietly in New York, completely forgotten, was an Irish woman called Ethel Boole ... Boole thought that the way to change the world was to give yourself up to the force of revolution, to surrender your individual self and your identity to the dream of a better future for others. At the end of the nineteenth century, Ethel Boole had gone to Russia as a young girl and become involved with the revolutionaries in Saint Petersburg, and she wrote a novel called The Gadfly. It told a powerful, romantic story of a young girl who sacrified everything for revolution. She then married a Polish revolutionary called Wilfrid Voynich, and in the 1920s they went to live in New York, where he worked as an antiquarian bookseller and Ethel Boole forgot about revolution. But in 1959, when the Bolshoi Ballet came to New York the dancers were astonished to find that she was alive, and they rushed to visit her - because Ethel Boole, without her realising it, had become a hero of the Russian revolution. She discovered that her novel had inspired millions of young revolutionaries in the 1920s to rise up and fight for the revolution, inspired by the idea of surrendering themselves to a grand historic cause. Then the same had happened in China. Again, millions of young revolutions had carried The Gadfly in their backpacks, as they fought to create a new kind of future. - Adam Curtis, Can't Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World