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BIOGRAPHY:The Woman Who Shot Mussolini, by Frances Stonor Saunders, Faber and Faber, 365pp, £12.99
ROME. APRIL 7th, 1926. A frail Anglo-Irish woman, the Honourable Violet Gibson (1876-1956), makes her way determinedly through the enthusiastic crowd gathered to greet Mussolini, then a leader respected around the capitals of the world. She gets as close as she can, pulls out her revolver and fires. She is not lucky. The first shot is a misfire. She fires again. She neither hits nor misses but skims the front of Benito’s nose. Instead of ending his life and saving Italy years of Fascist dictatorship and Europe a million lives, her own life is effectively ended here. She is arrested (is lucky not to be lynched) and is taken off to prison. Mussolini, shocked, recovers and will use this and later acts of aggression against him to add ballast to his aura of invincibility, indestructibility and “unmitigated masculinity” and to introduce stringent laws to gain even tighter control over his unfortunate country. Gibson will spend the immediate period in an Italian prison before being returned to Britain on the guarantee that she will remain locked up. She will spend 30 years of her life in a spiritually numbing lunatic asylum in Northampton (a mansion of despair which would also be “home” to Lucia Joyce), taking her place among the residents who were society’s unwanted and discarded, mad and depressed.
