Title: The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper

Author: Hallie Rubenhold

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2019

Genre: Nonfiction - History

Pages: 359

Rating: 4/5 stars

Reading Challenges: Ebook; TBR Random

Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Catherine, and Mary Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden, and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffeehouses, lived on country estates; they breathed ink dust from printing presses and escaped human traffickers.

What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888. 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.

For more than a century, newspapers have been keen to tell us that “the Ripper” preyed on prostitutes. 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. 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. They died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time—but their greatest misfortune was to be born women.

So much research went into this book! I am amazed at the level of detail Rubenhold discovered to recreate the world of the victims of Jack the Ripper. Overall and overall I marveled at the amount of detective work to uncover the lives of these women. History has certainly painted them in a specific light and one that is not accurate. I really enjoyed getting to know each of them in life. I learned a bit more about England in the 1880s (not my expertise in history) and revealed in the atmosphere Rubenhold creates. This book is very dense, but such a good collection of biographies.

Next up on the TBR pile: