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.