However, I've always been disappointed by histories that focus on the madman and dismiss the whole story about his victims. Ever since I started studying Victorian literature, the infamy of Jack the Ripper has been a part of the cultural and historical backdrop. I feel like I’ve waited years for this book. I cannot commend her enough for the work that she did in this book paying tribute to the victims of a mass murder and correcting what so many of us got wrong. They died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time-but their greatest misfortune was to be born women.'īrava to the Hallie Rubenhold for her extensive research delivering the truth behind the lives of the five women brutally murdered by Jack the Ripper. Now, in this devastating narrative of five lives, Rubenhold finally sets the record straight, revealing a world not just of Dickens and Queen Victoria, but of poverty, homelessness, and rampant misogyny. Not only is this untrue, as historian Hallie Rubenhold has discovered, but it has prevented the real stories of these fascinating women from being told. The person responsible was never identified, but the character created by the press to fill that gap has become far more famous than any of these five women.įor more than a century, newspapers have been keen to tell us that “the Ripper” preyed on prostitutes. What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888. They wrote ballads, ran coffeehouses, lived on country estates they breathed ink dust from printing presses and escaped human traffickers. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden, and Wales. Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Catherine, and Mary Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. 'Five devastating human stories and a dark and moving portrait of Victorian London-the untold lives of the women killed by Jack the Ripper

The Five by Hallie Rubenhold