Next month will mark the 70th anniversary of her death, and August the 150th of her birth. But the event for which Dubliner Violet Gibson became briefly famous happened 100 years ago this week, in Rome.
When Italian prime minister Benito Mussolini went walking among admirers at the Piazza del Campidoglio on April 7th, 1926, Gibson was waiting for him with a revolver in her shawl.
Mussolini turned his head just as she levelled the gun, which probably saved him. The first shot grazed his nose. The second jammed.
In the melee that followed, Gibson might have been lynched had police not intervened to rescue her from a mob. But her life was effectively over anyway.
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Declared insane, she was extradited back to England (her passport was British and she had been long exiled from Ireland), to spend the rest of her life in a Northampton psychiatric hospital.
Mussolini, meanwhile, pressed on with his mission to “guide the destinies of Italy with a hand of iron”.
His return to parliament in late April earned an ovation lasting minutes. He affected to find talk of the shooting “tedious”. Even so, foreshadowing a more recent assassination attempt in the US, he kept the bandage on his nose for longer than was necessary.
Gibson’s gravestone in Northampton says little of this. Simple to a fault, it makes no mention of her Irish origins, nor of the Rome incident, confining itself instead to the minimalist: “Violet Gibson 1876 – 1956” .
But in acknowledging her place in history, a plaque erected at the Gibsons’ former family home on Dublin’s Merrion Square in 2022 is also elliptical. Recording her name and dates of birth and death, that avoids mention of the 1926 event in favour of a euphemism describing her as “Anti-Fascist”.
Was she? After the Mussolini shooting, members of her aristocratic family were quoted in The Irish Times as struggling to understand her motivations. “So far as Lady Ashbourne knew,” paraphrased the paper of one interview, “her sister-in-law could herself be described as a fascist, and yet she had fired at Mussolini.”
But 12 months earlier, after travelling to Rome for the holy year of 1925, Gibson had shot herself in a hotel room, claiming it was for the glory of God. And having survived that, according to the same Lady Ashbourne, she “several times declared that she would assassinate the pope.”
This was all a far cry from Gibson’s privileged childhood as the daughter of lawyer and unionist MP Edward Gibson, aka Baron Ashbourne, attorney general for Ireland in the late 1870s and later lord chancellor.
Brought up to be an “ornament” at public events involving important men, Violet was a regular feature in the society pages, as when she attended a ball at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham in 1902, of which this newspaper reported:
“Lady Ashbourne [Violet’s mother] wore rich brocade, with white lace, black velvet and diamonds; the Hon Violet Gibson was becomingly dressed in white satin ...”
But her abiding interest in religion had already included a flirtation with theosophy, an esoteric belief system also espoused by WB Yeats. Then she converted to Catholicism and, in 1915, adopted a self-mortifying form of it, promoted by Irish-American Jesuit John O’Fallon Pope, which included fasting, flagellation and the wearing of hair shirts.
Although she never returned to Ireland after 1913, it was later suggested conflict in Northern Ireland had driven her to insanity. The family, however, believed it was a personal bereavement in 1922 that proved pivotal.
“We date the alteration in her from the death of my brother, Victor”, her sister Constance told newspapers in 1926:
“We are a family of eight and have always gone in pairs. Victor was found dead, whether by his own hand or that of somebody else ... Violet, losing the playmate of her life, gave way to paroxysms of grief, which in the end unhinged her mind.”
Gibson would share her last years at St Andrew’s Hospital with another notable patient of Irish origin, Lucia Joyce, daughter of the writer James. It has been said of both that in their long incarcerations (for schizophrenia in Lucia’s case) they were to some degree the victims of misogyny.
[ Her father’s daughter – An Irish Diary about the tragic life of Lucia JoyceOpens in new window ]
This may be true, although there is also the case of another famous writer of the period who spent years in a psychiatric institution, despite being both male and a friend of Joyce.
Ezra Pound so admired the author of Ulysses that in the early 1920s, he even invented a calendar notionally founded at the moment Joyce wrote the book’s last word. Thereafter, Pound took to dating letters on the basis that midnight of October 24th, 1921, was Day 1, Year 1, “p.s. U” (post-scriptum Ulysses).
The novelty soon wore off. Later, Pound adopted the “Era Fascista” calendar, invented by another of his heroes: Mussolini. The starting point of that was the “March on Rome” in 1922. But the calendar had to be backdated from its formal adoption in 1927, a year after the Era Fascista survived by the skin of its nose.
