The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the RipperWinner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction Five devastating human stories and a dark and moving portrait of Victorian London--the untold lives of the women killed by Jack the Ripper. Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, 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 coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-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, 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 werein the wrong place at the wrong time--but their greatest misfortune was to be born a woman. |
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LibraryThing Review
User Review - nx74defiant - LibraryThingThere is much written about Jack the Ripper. But little about his victims. This covers the lives of the five victims. How did they come to be in White Chapel? We learn about the harshness of life at that time for poor women, the middle and lower classes. Read full review
LibraryThing Review
User Review - smorton11 - LibraryThingSince it’s Nonfiction November, I figured I better catch up on some of the Nonfiction Book Club selections from this year. Though book club is on hiatus until May (I am so burnt out on virtual ... Read full review
Contents
Polly | 15 |
Annie | 75 |
Elisabeth | 135 |
Photographs | 185 |
Kate | 186 |
Mary Jane | 253 |
Back Matter | 286 |
Back Flap | 335 |
Back Cover | 336 |
Spine | 337 |
Other editions - View all
The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper Hallie Rubenhold Limited preview - 2019 |
The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper Hallie Rubenhold No preview available - 2019 |
The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper Hallie Rubenhold No preview available - 2020 |
Common terms and phrases
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Bibliographic information
| Title | The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper |
| Author | Hallie Rubenhold |
| Edition | illustrated |
| Publisher | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019 |
| ISBN | 1328663817, 9781328663818 |
| Length | 333 pages |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |