Reviews with content warning for Alcoholism - The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper

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

121 reviews

oceanwriter's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional informative sad medium-paced

4.0

Behind Jack the Ripper is the lives of his victims. Given the illusiveness of this particular killer, the women he slayed tend to be swept aside. This book gives them a voice.

Each section of the book discusses each woman: Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Kate, and Mary Jane. We learn about their lives leading up to their murders rather than the murder themselves. Along with the story of their lives, the author provides a detailed history of life in England at the time.

I was initially surprised by the fact Jack the Ripper was hardly mentioned, but I think I ultimately enjoyed the book more because of it. It was incredibly insightful and put a lot of things in perspective. I will say that this was about 60% general history and 40% the five women. While interesting, this did cause the narration to drag at times. It’s worth wading through the slow bits. There is a lot to take in.

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pedanther's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative sad medium-paced

4.5

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carlaah1984's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative medium-paced

4.75

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avidreaderandgeekgirl's review against another edition

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emotional informative reflective medium-paced

4.5

An interesting look into the true lives of Jack the Ripper's conical five victims and thoughts on how they've been forgotten and twisted by the press and others while he's become infamous. The fact that only 2 of them were sex workers was surprising to me because I'd heard the familiar story. But they were sleeping on the street because of poverty.

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staceyinthesticks's review against another edition

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informative sad medium-paced

4.0

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nieva098's review against another edition

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emotional informative sad medium-paced

4.0

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jesshindes's review against another edition

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adventurous dark informative inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

Hallie Rubenhold's The Five is a sort of group biography (more like a series of short biographies) of the women killed by Jack the Ripper: Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Kate Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly. As Rubenhold points out in her blistering final chapter, it's shocking that it took until 2019 for someone to write these stories; that so much time and energy has been spent on the murderer and so little on the women he killed.

Rubenhold's book inverts that balance - she isn't interested in the Ripper, doesn't believe it's possible to identify him, and more fundamentally questions why we are so ghoulishly entertained by him in the first place. These are issues that are being addressed more frequently now since the boom in true crime podcasts etc and I think they're very applicable here - but what's more interesting is all the original research that underpins The Five, and the detailed portraits that Rubenhold is able to paint of each of its subjects.

One of the book's primary innovations is to show that only one of the women killed - Mary Jane Kelly - was a prostitute, in the sense of this being her primary occupation. Elizabeth Stride may have participated in sex work towards the end of her life and there's no evidence that any of the other three did so at all. It's not that there's anything wrong with being a sex worker but the fact that the murders are framed as targeting prostitutes when this is evidently inaccurate does show the degree to which these women have been sidelined in the story of their own deaths. Rather than being linked by prostutution, then, what Rubenhold shows is that all five women were linked by destitution and particularly insecure housing; four of the five were killed as they slept on the Whitechapel streets. The Five is therefore largely a series of stories about descending into poverty; falling from security, even the relative and contingent security of the working class, into a position where you might wake up each morning unsure of where you'd spend that night. The causes are so simple and so painful: the breakdown of domestic partnerships. Alcoholism. A lack of access to contraception. Disease. The loss of employment. Every one of these stories is different but the common factors are telling. Rubenhold shows you these women, illustrates their problems, and in doing so makes a wider point about how easy it was to drop out of the bottom of Victorian society - especially as a woman, whose labour was worth less than a man's and whose sexual virtue was treated as both more important and more fragile.

It's no secret that I am super interested in the Victorian period but I really loved this book and would recommend it to anybody interested in women's history but also working class history. As much as anything else, it shows you the importance of the welfare state that the government is presently doing its best to dismantle 🙃 We shouldn't forget these women or the thousands like them, eaten up and spat out by the hardships of the nineteenth century.

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