Victorian Gaslighting
Victorian Gaslighting: Genealogy of an Injustice (SUNY, 2026), co-edited by Diana Bellonby, Nora Gilbert, and Tara MacDonald, is the first cultural history of a widespread form of emotional abuse that originated in the nineteenth century. The term “gaslighting” comes from a neo-Victorian horror story, Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play Gas Light and its two 1940s film adaptations, about a husband who manipulates his wife into believing she’s going insane. The thirteen essays gathered in this collection show how Gas Light’s Victorian setting, plot, characters, and themes provide an expert’s guide not only to gaslighting, but also to the history of oppression and rebellion that fueled it. We chronicle this history through a treasure trove of untold stories by and about women, including Mary Prince, Catherine Dickens, Harriet Martineau, Charlotte Tonna, Vernon Lee, and many others. These women’s real and fictional tales of abuse reveal that gaslighting is a fundamentally narrative act of violence, one that depends on the power to propagate a false story. Readers will learn how myth-making underpins different types of gaslighting and how storytelling is essential to resisting it.
JOIN US FOR THE PAPERBACK LAUNCH IN MADISON, CT
FEATURING
Diana Bellonby, Sarah Mesle, &
Arielle Zibrak on Women’s Stories
DATE: Friday 9/25/2026
TIME: 5:30-6:30 pm
PLACE: Madison Beach Hotel, Faulkner Room
94 West Wharf Rd.
Madison, CT 06443
How do stories from the nineteenth century help us understand women’s lives today? Join three writers as they discuss their new books, feminism, the stories we tell, and the stories that hide. We’ll take a closer look at Diana Bellonby’s new co-edited collection of women’s gaslighting stories, then share a lively conversation about her work, Sarah Mesle’s new Tangled: Seven Iconic Moments in White Women’s Hair and What They Tell Us About Power, Pleasure, and Complicity, and Arielle Zibrak’s recent Twelve Stories by American Women and Avidly Reads: Guilty Pleasures.
Free & Open to the Public. Questions about this event? Email us here.
Sarah Mesle is a professor of writing at the University of Southern California. Her many essays about gender and popular culture have appeared in venues like the Los Angeles Review of Books, InStyle magazine, and the New York Times Magazine. She is the editor of the digital magazine Avidly. In addition to Tangled (Beacon, 2026), she is the author of Reasons and Feelings: Writing For the Humanities Now (Chicago, 2025). Image by Sarah Sido.
Arielle Zibrak is Professor of English at the University of Wyoming. She is the author of Avidly Reads: Guilty Pleasures (New York University Press, 2021) and Writing Against Reform: Aesthetic Realism in the Progressive Era (University of Massachusetts Press, 2023) and the editor of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence: New Centenary Essays (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Twelve Stories by American Women Writers (Penguin Classics, 2025). She is currently at work on a history of New Thought and alternative women’s wellness culture forthcoming from Liveright/Norton.