The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on October 29, 2025
Genres: Biography & Autobiography / Women, History / Europe / Great Britain / Victorian Era (1837-1901), History / Social History, Social Science / Social Classes & Economic Disparity, Social Science / Sociology / Urban, Social Science / Violence in Society, Social Science / Women's Studies, True Crime / Murder / Serial Killers
Pages: 333
Format: Hardcover
Source: Library
StoryGraph
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.
Most people who know me know that I love true crime. It’s a combination of the mystery aspect and the psychology behind each crime. What makes a person do something so heinous? What circumstances or environment drove them to do this? Yet, something that I’ve battled with the past couple of years is the ethics behind consuming true crime media. I’ve actually limited my consumption of true crime media to the podcast Small Town Murder (and I do listen to their other two podcasts as well Crime in Sports and Your Stupid Opinions) because of how the two hosts, James and Jimmie, handle the crimes. Yes, comedy is involved, but the solemnity they bring to the crimes themselves and the victims (not only those murdered but the family members affected by them) is really well done in honoring the person and the life they lived. Part of the ethics of consuming true crime media that I’ve grappled with the past couple of years is the fact that most people remember the names of the murderers but not the victims. Their lives are cut short and then the media blasts their killer’s name everywhere while only a small group actually remembers those affected. Still, is anything surrounding true crime media really helping. Obviously, crime is down in most places, but I don’t think that has anything to do with true crime consumption but with more access to resources and help that people need. At the end of the day, most crimes are committed because a need isn’t being met. This isn’t always the case. Some cases involve truly heinous acts by certain individuals, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and of course, Jack the Ripper.
I’m not going to say I’m not fascinated by the Jack the Ripper crimes. I wouldn’t categorize myself as a Ripperologist, I don’t keep up with every theory out there nor have I read every piece of media about them or their crimes. Yet, it’s probably what first piqued my interest in true crime. Over a hundred years later and we still don’t know who Jack the Ripper is. I guess you could call him my original boogeyman. Obviously, I knew even as a child that he wasn’t going to get me, as he’s already long dead. Yet, the fact that the mystery isn’t solved left a frisson of doubt that I could never quite shake.
Now, in my 30s I’m a bit embarrassed as someone who’s always been a proponent of remembering the victims names of serial killers that I’ve never looked further into the story of Jack the Ripper’s victims. I’m obviously not alone in this as this is one of the first, if not the first, books I’ve seen that dives into the lives of Jack the Ripper’s victims.
Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Catherine, and Mary Jane. The five canonical victims of Jack the Ripper. The five women who’s lives were cut short due to circumstances out of their control. Hallie Rubenhold does an amazing job in giving back the lives and voices of these women in this book and explaining how these women’s dignity and lives were robbed by the police and the media after the fact. With even less oversight over the news back then, anything could be written about anyone no matter how true or false. The definition/law at the time for prostitution was so broadly defined that any woman walking down the street could be considered one. Plus, good old fashioned misogyny from the police. It’s no wonder we were all left to think that these women were prostitutes.
The fact that only two of the five women (Elisabeth and Mary Jane) were prostitutes in their lives, and only one was a prostitute at the time of the murder (Mary Jane) does not matter. No one should play god and take lives. Society likes to think differently, and we would all like to think that we’re more “civilized” today then in Victorian England. Mr. Edward Fairfield, a senior civil servant at the Colonial Office, wrote to the Times “the horror and excitement caused by the murder of the four Whitechapel outcasts imply a universal belief that they had a right to life…If they had, then they had the further right to hire shelter from the bitterness of the English night. It they had no such right, then it was, on the whole, a good thing that they fell in with the unknown surgical genius. He, at all events, has made his contribution towards solving, ‘the problem of clearing the East-end of its vicious inhabitants.'” Yet, nothing much has changed since the 1880s cause as I’m writing this, I’m listening to Dateline were a woman named Paige goes missing (and is later found murdered), a mother of three who was involved in her community, but who also lived a double life as an escort. Once found out, someone in the community wrote to their local paper “why are we spending all this time looking for a dead hooker?” Less eloquent then how it was written in Victorian England but the intention behind it is all the same. In many people’s minds, these women do not matter! They are “fallen” or “broken” or “lazy” or any number of horrible term we prescribe to women who fall into sex work without looking past that to see them as full humans.
I really loved that Rubenhold doesn’t rehash the murders. Most of the time we hear Jack the Ripper, and we think gore and violence. After all, he did “rip” the women apart, and the crime scenes were bloody messes. Here Rubenhold does not tell us about that. She does talk about the last time they were seen (supposedly), who would’ve made the identification, and the (possible) arrangements after the murder. So, don’t go into this thinking the crimes are going to be rehashed. There’s hundreds, if not millions, of media pieces that go into great detail about the murders themselves, you can go find them yourself.
No, instead these women are not only given back their lives but, as cringey and embarrassing as it may sound, are finally laid to rest in peace. Their backstories of how they ended up in Whitechapel are given to us, their childhood to marriages to jobs to children are revealed. A fully fleshed out person appears on the page, not just the word “prostitute.”
As with some history books, sources can be hard to come by. I do appreciate how Rubenhold laid out the book. She gives clear information on the fact that the coroner’s inquests were the most reliable source material but only provide the information of the body after the murder and forensic science wasn’t the best back then. There’s also the problem that the official documentation for three of the five cases is missing, so what remains is “a body of edited, embellished, misheard, reinterpreted newspaper reports from which a general picture of events can be teased…nothing contained within them has been taken as gossip.” Even without the original source material, Rubenhold gives us as full of a picture of the lives these women led as she can. Besides the biographical information, she delves into the poverty, homelessness, and the social issues of the time that gives a clearer picture of how these women’s lives may have been lived.
In the end, these women’s lives are boiled down to a handful of words “prostitute” and “victims of Jack the Ripper.” We remember the murderer and not the victims. So again, here are their names:
Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elisabeth Stride, Kate Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly. All of them had their own lives and dreams and want to live if only society was kinder.
As James and Jimmie like to do on Small Town Murder, I’d also like to emulate by giving a chance for one of the victims to speak. We’re not one hundred percent positive that it was Elisabeth Stride who said it, but it might have been. No matter what, what she says is important. In a conversation with Thomas Barnardo, a social reformer, Elisabeth (or one of the many other women who were discarded by society) said: “We’re all up to no good and no one cares what becomes of us. Perhaps some of us will be killed next! If anybody had helped the likes of us years ago we would have never come to this!” Hallie Rubenhold ends this paragraph with these words that are as true today as they were back then: “In truth, they all might have been Elisabeth Stride, and certainly Elisabeth strove to be all those women–everyone and no one. She was anonymous: a woman with a mutable story, a changeable history, someone who had recognized that the world didn’t care about her, and chose to use that as a weapon in order to survive.”
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