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

Winner 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 were in the wrong place at the wrong time&;but their greatest misfortune was to be born a woman.