What We Are Reading Today: The Life of Violet by Virginia Woolf

What We Are Reading Today: The Life of Violet by Virginia Woolf
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Updated 11 October 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: The Life of Violet by Virginia Woolf

What We Are Reading Today: The Life of Violet by Virginia Woolf

In 1907, eight years before she published her first novel, a 25-year-old Virginia Woolf drafted three interconnected comic stories chronicling the adventures of a giantess named Violet — a teasing tribute to Woolf’s friend Mary Violet Dickinson.

But it was only in 2022 that Woolf scholar Urmila Seshagiri discovered a final, revised typescript of the stories.

The typescript revealed that Woolf had finished this mock-biography, making it her first fully realized literary experiment and a work that anticipates her later masterpieces.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘On Gaslighting’ by Kate Abramson

What We Are Reading Today: ‘On Gaslighting’ by Kate Abramson
Updated 04 November 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘On Gaslighting’ by Kate Abramson

What We Are Reading Today: ‘On Gaslighting’ by Kate Abramson

“Gaslighting” is suddenly in everyone’s vocabulary. It’s written about, talked about, tweeted about, even sung about it.

It’s become shorthand for being manipulated by someone who insists that up is down, hot is cold, dark is light—someone who isn’t just lying about such things, but trying to drive you crazy.

The term has its origins in a 1944 film in which a husband does exactly that to his wife, his crazy-making efforts symbolized by the rise and fall of the gaslights in their home. Kate Abramson examines gaslighting from a philosophical perspective, investigating it as a distinctive moral phenomenon.