What if Violet could shoot?

Frances Stonor Saunders’ book The Woman Who Shot Mussolini explores Violet’s attempted assassination of Il Duce in 1926 and her treatment in mental institutions afterward. Gibson, the daughter of the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, emerges as a wounded and fragile woman seeking to define her life at a time when Ireland was trying to define itself. In her youth she mixed with the aristocracy and royalty. She died in 1956 in St Andrew’s Hospital for Mental Diseases, Northampton – where James Joyce’s daughter Lucia would later be committed – having been committed there after her departure from Italy. At the end of her life she was largely confined to her bed through illness but still keenly interested in news and current affairs.

Stonor Saunders’ sympathies are firmly with Violet, and it is difficult not to feel the same. What the author attempts to do is find out why things happened to Violet as they did, and it is a stirring and interesting look into what motivates people.