Ethel Lilian Voynich

The world's most famous unknown manuscript bears her name only because a merchant bought it from her estate. Ethel Lilian Voynich never wrote The Gadfly's mysterious companion; she died in New York in 1960, leaving behind music, revolution and a story about a man who laughed while suffering. Wilfrid Voynich paid for the manuscript with money earned through her earlier fame, then disappeared into history beside it. The trick is not that she owns the book. The trick is that fame worked backwards, pulling an unknown woman into the centre of a puzzle she never solved.