**Intact Gift Giving Condition book**

Victorian Gaslighting is the first literary-cultural history of gaslighting, a term derived from the haunting neo-Victorian play Gas Light (1938), which tells the story of a sadistic husband who manipulates his wife into believing she’s losing her mind. Reads gaslighting as a term, concept, and form of abuse fundamentally tied to the literature and culture of the Victorian British Empire. The collection traces the type of emotional abuse we find in the various stage and screen versions of the play back to its nineteenth-century British roots. Gaslighting emerged during an era when the idea of madness was debated, misused, policed, and medicalized like never before―and when the interlocking institutions of patriarchy, slavery, and imperialism sought to convince women, racialized others, and colonized subjects that their own perceptions were not to be trusted.