The Five

Author/Guide: Hallie Rubenhold

Why a Booktrail?

1888: The untold story about the ripper’s victims. They finally get their voice back.

ISBN: 978-0857524485
Genre: Historical, Non-Fiction

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What you need to know before your trail

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.

Their murderer was never identified, but the name created for him by the press has become far more famous than any of these five women.

Now, in this devastating narrative of five lives, historian Hallie Rubenhold finally sets the record straight, and gives these women back their stories.

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Discover the real stories of the women Jack the Ripper murdered

This is the story of the woman murdered by a murderer who has remained more well known than (his) victims. This book aims to give them their voices back and allow them to be heard.

“Just as it did in the nineteenth century, the notion that the victims were ‘only prostitutes’ seeks to perpetuate the belief that there are good women and bad women; madonnas and whores. It suggests that there is an acceptable standard of female behaviour and those that deviate from it are fit to be punished. Equally, it assists in reasserting the double standard , exonerating men from wrongs committed against such women. These attitudes may not feel as prevalent as they were in 1888, but they persist – not proffered in general conversation… but, rather integrated subtly into the fabric of our social norms.”

Booktrailer Review

Out of all the books I have read about Jack the Ripper and the women he murdered, I’ve never heard much about the women themselves. Well, apart from the fact that they were poor, prostitutes or the lowest of the low depending on what you read. After everything, these were all women, daughters or mothers, sisters or friends of someone. They were human. What this book does is to give them their voices and to shine the light on to them,, taking it away from the awful and terrible person who killed them. This is perhaps one of the most infamous crimes in the world but few people know all of the names of those Jack the Ripper killed. I think this book helps redress the balance and I was fascinated to learn more about these woman – who they were, not just what they were or what society held them as. Top research and care has gone into the writing and I think the author has really taken care to rewrite what we think we all know, but shine the light on the voices we should really be listening to.