The Five

This book wrecked me; it’s such a deep dive into the lives of the woman brutally murdered by Jack the Ripper. Rubenhold reconstructs their lives with great empathy, bringing them to the forefront of the story. The five were real women who felt love, pain, and hope—not faceless victims of sensationalized murder.

These women are often portrayed as “five prostitutes” in pop culture, but Rubenhold shows that there is no evidence of sex work for most of the women. This book pulls back the curtain on the tension, violence, poverty, and heartbreak in Victorian London. This book brought me to… show more.

What I love about this book is that it is not another investigation into the mysterious (and now mythologized) Jack the Ripper in late Victorian London. Rather, the book is about his victims.

In rendering each woman’s life within the harsh realities of working-class East London, Rubenhold completely shifts the way I have come to understand the entrenched claims that Ripper’s victims were all prostitutes. I love the research and speculation the book offers into the lives of the five women, recovering their complexities and difficulties among the squalor of Whitechapel. It’s a compelling read that held me from start… show more.

Finally, a book that is wholly focused on the victims of one of history’s most notorious (and anonymous) serial killers.

Moreso than the descriptive details of five gruesome murders, I think the importance of this book is the conclusion Rubenhold reaches on women, sexuality, poverty, law, and justice in the Victorian age. 

Ok, so I’m cheating a little bit here. A lot of people have heard of the women Rubenhold writes about because they’re famous for being Jack the Ripper’s victims.

And for many of the women, what they did was not particularly scandalous, since Rubenhold goes a long way to show that not all of them were streetwalkers. But this book is such a beautiful and heartbreaking read. It’s a meticulous and gripping reconstruction of the lives of women we thought we knew but don’t. She brings nineteenth-century London alive in a way that few authors have – when I read… show more.

The Five is an exceptional piece of historical detective work about five women, victims of a notorious serial killer, whom Rubenhold has managed to restore to humanity. Until now, they were casually dismissed as fallen women, while a cult developed about the Ripper himself.

I was fascinated by Rubenhold’s research into the hard lives, bad luck, and ill-health that dogged the lives of Jack the Ripper’s victims, only one of whom was a confirmed prostitute. The portrait of Dickensian London is rich with horrifying details, while the women, themselves, are shown as wives, mothers, and sisters. But most of all,… show more.

This is a superb book that rightly won a number of literary prizes after its publication in 2020. 

Rather than play the parlour game of trying to guess the identity of Jack the Ripper, Rubenhold – a social historian – does what the book says on its cover: it tells the stories of the women who were killed by Jack the Ripper. We see them in their complexity and begin to understand the crushing social and economic circumstances that came to dominate their lives before they were murdered.  

I know what you’re thinking. As soon as I say The Five is nonfiction about the victims of Jack the Ripper, you’re going to cringe. 

Not to worry, this incredible book is a recounting not of the murders, but of the lives of Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Catherine, and Mary Jane, victims of history’s most notorious serial killer.

Rubenhold’s extensive and impressive research introduces us to each woman, and the finely crafted prose helps us understand what their lives—and the lives of so many women in Victorian times—were like. 

When you read the book (and you’ll thank me for it) don’t… show more.

The five women who were Jack the Ripper’s canonical victims have always been just that, his victims. Rubenhold gives them back their identities, in their own right, as mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives and challenges the ‘traditional’ view. For three of them, there is no evidence that they were prostitutes, but all five were women battling personal demons who were down on their luck. They were Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly. The Five is not the story of their deaths, but their lives.

I love books that teach me something new about something I had always assumed to be true, like the “fact” that Jack the Ripper preyed on prostitutes. Rubenhold turns this narrative on its head to give Ripper’s canonical victims “that which was so brutally taken away with their lives: their dignity.” These exhaustively researched biographies show how sickness, trauma, and addiction intersected with the indifference of employers, husbands, and public officials to force each woman out onto the streets of Whitechapel. The Five is not just an impassioned indictment of middle-class Victorian society, but of any society that decides working-class… show more.

Well over a century after his reign of terror, Jack the Ripper remains a household name, his identity the subject of endless public debate. In her group biography of the ‘Canonical Five’—the five women most widely regarded as the Ripper’s victims—Hallie Rubenhold takes a different approach. Instead of spilling yet more ink on attempts to unmask this Victorian serial killer, she focuses instead on the women whose lives were brutally taken away. I loved the way that Rubenhold’s justifiably angry narrative transformed Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly from a homogenous group of… show more.