The Five

The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper

By: Hallie Rubenhold

Narrated by: Louise Brealey

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, 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 a woman.

©2019 Hallie Rubenhold (P)2019 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Smash the Patriarchy!

Author breathes life into each woman by telling her personal story in relation to the social constructs of the era in which she lived. Author concludes by linking the past to the present, illustrating the pervasive lenses of misogyny with which many people view both the past and the present. Smash the patriarchy, dammit.

Read it

Do yourself a favor and read this book. Aside from the interesting new discoveries and insights (of which there are many), the biographies are deeply moving.

Beautiful portrait of the victims

If you’re a Ripperologist, then you need to read/listen to this book. This does not cover any of the killings but instead focuses on the lives of the 5 victims. The author presents a new light onto Jack that instead of a stalking killer of prostitues but instead a cowardly opportunity killer. She also shines the light on the roles of women in Victorian era and the impossible challenges that they faced. I have always felt sorry and angered for the victims but now I am even more saddened and enraged.

Non-fiction at it's best

I've never written a review before, on anything or for anything with the exception of blindly tapping at my screen to fill in stars, or at best a sentence or two of impression acknowledged. That may be because I've never seen a monster slain before now. Replacing my image of the top hat and cape with a weasely killer of homeless women as they attempted to sleep on the streets of a city that would rather they not be there.

The Five not only brings to life the women of white chapel into a vivid color allowing a portrait of middle class life in England and the ease with which someone [especially women] could fall in the desperate bottom learning the harshest lesson of all, that the villain of this story was not a man at all but Victorian England itself.

I wept at each funeral scene and especially after the end during the reading nothing more than the contents of four of the five women's pockets.

A side of history ignored.

This book was recommended to me by a friend as a "page turner". She wasn't kidding! The look into who these women really were was eye-opening and heartbreaking.
Even before finishing this book I was recommending it to others. This is a book you think about between listening to and you will want to discuss it with others.