Book review: The Woman Who Shot Mussolini

The Woman Who Shot Mussoliniby Frances Stonor SaundersFaber, 384pp, £20

WHO was crazier: Benito Mussolini, or Violet Gibson, the woman who fired a gun at his head one spring morning in 1926? By the end of Frances Stonor Saunders's fascinating book, you're likely to cast a vote for the Fascist dictator and wonder why it was Gibson who lived out her days in a mental hospital.

Gibson has languished amid the footnotes to history, but in Saunders she's found a skilful, ardent champion. It's a profitable two-way exchange, however, for the author adroitly uses Gibson's life story as the springboard for a consistently entertaining work that's part biography, part anecdotal social commentary and part political analysis that casts an appraising eye on the way British politicians got it so incredibly wrong in the early 20th century.

Though ill health and privation gave her the look of an elderly pauper, Violet Gibson was actually an Honourable, a daughter of the first Lord Ashbourne and a member of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. She grew up in Dublin and London, in a family that had made their mark politically and socially. Saunders writes: "The principal aspiration for Lord Ashbourne's daughters was that they should marry well and thus consolidate the family's Anglo-Protestant respectability."

A frail child who grew up prone to dramatic illnesses – dismissed as hypochondria by some – Violet was briefly a Christian Scientist before throwing that over in favour of Theosophy. By the time she was 26, however, she'd converted to Catholicism.

Religion became so central to her life that she often went to live among nuns. She often claimed that she tried to kill Mussolini because it was her duty as a good Christian to intervene in God's name in human affairs. Il Duce was, she felt sure, corrupting a country she adored.

Interwoven with Gibson's story are equally illuminating chapters devoted to Mussolini, a truly self-made man (he even practised his postures) not above using Christian iconography for his own ends. A biography by one of his mistresses compared his scar-covered body to St Sebastian's, and he enjoyed portraying himself as a Christlike figure.

Saunders demonstrates how Mussolini created his own mythology, drawing on his journalistic background to manipulate public opinion. Among those he flummoxed were the British, who found him a fine figure of a man. It's worth remembering, at this point, that a swathe of the British population was equally enamoured of Hitler for a time.

When the two lives intersected, Gibson managed only to clip the end of Il Duce's nose before being manhandled by the crowd and whisked off to prison and then an Italian sanitorium. She was eventually finessed out of the country – thanks to Mussolini's decision to flout the very laws he'd recently enacted – back to England in what Saunders refers to as "a highly professional smuggling operation". There, she was thrown into a different kind of jail, left to live out her days in a posh Victorian-style mental hospital, largely ignored by all but a few friends and one of her sisters.

Saunders gets the tone just right. She's fiercely protective of her subject, but never glosses over her flaws. Gibson was certainly difficult, though the extent of her mental illness can never now be assessed. She tried to commit suicide and often struck out – literally – without provocation, attacking those around her with whatever was to hand. Saunders cleverly sets this obscure woman in her milieu, fleshing out her circumstances by drawing parallels to a diverse cast of characters, from Virginia Woolf and Nancy Astor to Nijinsky and Maud Gonne. She draws on a store of wonderfully juicy anecdotes and sometimes hilarious quotes. Best of all, the book wears its scholarship lightly. Thus when Saunders reports that all over Italy, God was thanked for sparing Mussolini's life, she closes by saying: "A strange God, this, who tells Violet Gibson to shoot Mussolini, and then instructs the bullet not to kill him."

Chatty, intelligent and frequently surprising, The Woman Who Shot Mussolini is that wonderful thing: history delivered with the breathtaking pace of a novel.