famous for her first novel The Gadfly, first published in 1897 in the United States (June) and Britain (September), about the struggles of an international revolutionary in Italy who was loosely based on the figure of Giuseppe Mazzini. This novel was very popular in the Soviet Union and was the top bestseller and compulsory reading there, where it was seen as ideologically useful; for similar reasons, the novel has been popular in the People's Republic of China as well. By the time of Voynich's death The Gadfly had sold an estimated 2,500,000 copies in the Soviet Union and had been made into two Russian movies, first in 1928 in Soviet Georgia (Krazana) and then again in 1955. Historian Mark Mazower describes The Gadfly as ‘a radical fin de siècle English novel’ translated into Yiddish by his grandfather, Max Mazower, being published in 1907 in Vilna, then part of the Russian Empire, now Vilnius, Lithuania. Its dramatic story serves as an allegory for the struggle for liberty in Russia. Not only did it circulate widely among socialists in Russia, it appealed enormously to people of progressive ideas elsewhere with soaring popularity in Britain towards the end of the First World War. Sidney Reilly, the famous British “Ace of Spies” is said to have either modelled himself on or served as a model for Voynich's hero. Reilly, in turn, was used by Ian Fleming as a model for James Bond, the most famous fictional spy of the Cold War. The 1955 film of the novel, by the Soviet director Aleksandr Fajntsimmer is noted for the fact that composer Dmitri Shostakovich wrote the score (see The Gadfly Suite). Along with some other excerpts, the Romance movement has since become very popular. Shostakovich's Gadfly theme was also used in the 1980s, in the BBC TV series Reilly, Ace of Spies. In 1980 the novel was adapted again as a TV miniseries The Gadfly, featuring Sergei Bondarchuk as Father Montanelli. Various other adaptations exist, including at least three operas and two ballets. Other novels Voynich's other four novels never achieved the same success as The Gadfly, but two of them extended its narrative. An Interrupted Friendship (1910) elaborates on The Gadfly'''s protagonist's backstory, and Put Off Thy Shoes (1945), Voynich's last novel, further focuses on the life of the protagonist's family and ancestors; a "lengthy, multi-generational chronicle" set in the 18th century. Her second novel,