Sometimes a diagram is best.

On the back of my looking into the life of Ethel Voynich, I kept on coming across the same names, sometimes in different contexts, so to try and make sense out of it I drew my self a very rough mud map.

• Ethel Voynich was a governess to Sergei Stepniak’s sister in law’s children in Russia, and was a translator and a member of the Friends of Russian Freedom.
• Constance Garnett learned Russian from Feliks Volkhovsky, was a member of the Friends of Russian Freedom
• Feliks Volkhovsky was a friend of Sergei Stepniak and a fellow exile in London, and a member of the Friends of Russian Freedom
• Olive Garnett was a sister in law to Constance Garnett, was apolitical, learned Russian from Feliks Volkhovsky. She appears to have had a crush on Sergei Stepniak, cutting off her hair when he died in a railway accident. She later worked as a governess in Russia, before returning to England.
• Charlotte Wilson knew both Stepniak and Ethel Voynich and also worked as translator of Russian, and was a members of the Friends of Russian Freedom.

As well as the links to the Friends of Russian Freedom, most of the women concerned – apart from the apolitical Olive Garnett – were also connected with the Fabian Society, and in the case of Charlotte Wilson various Russian influenced marxist reading reading groups.

Many of the women involved perfected their Russian by spending time working as governesses in Russia, probably because it was really the only way a young woman could gain experience of real spoken Russian at the time.

It’s an oddity of the times that the only way English speakers could learn Russian in the late Victorian era was via exiled revolutionaries. (Actually it’s not that odd – when I first learned Russian in the early 1970s, the only way one could get experience of spoken Russian was via exile groups, and there used to be these sessions at Strathclyde University where we got to speak to both recent exiles and some people who seemed very old, but who had probably been children or teenagers at the time of the 1917 revolutions)

And while we might laugh at Constance Garnett’s slightly prudish translations today, the women involved in the Friends of Russian Freedom were responsible to introducing Russian literature to a late Victorian and Edwardian audience, including such literary figures as Katherine Mansfield, who became fascinated by Chekhov through translation,