The New York Times Book Review - Marilyn Stasio
In giving these women their voices back, Rubenhold, a social historian, has produced a significant study of how poor and working-class women subsisted in an unforgiving age…Rubenhold doesn't transform these women into church ladies, but she's determined to save their sullied reputations.
From the Publisher
A New York Times Book Review ‘Summer Reading Best True Crime’ A Washington Post ‘20 Books to Read This Summer’ An Oprah.com ‘20 Best True Crime Books That’ll Make You Want to Sleep With the Lights On’ “Rubenhold has produced a significant study of how poor and working-class women subsisted in an unforgiving age.”—The New York Times Book Review “Hallie Rubenhold’s hard-edged, heartbreaking biographies of the five women killed by Jack the Ripper over two months in 1888 offer a blistering counter-narrative to the ‘male, authoritarian, and middle class’ legend of a demonic superman preying on prostitutes… Her riveting work, both compassionate group portrait and stinging social history, finally gives them their due.”—The Washington Post “The five London women murdered by Jack the Ripper, in 1888, were long assumed to be prostitutes. This history shows otherwise, presenting deeply researched portraits of the victims as they lived: they were all poor, some to the point of homelessness; they were all apparently killed while asleep; and, with one exception, they were known by family and acquaintances not to be prostitutes. Each had a distinct story that has never been fully or truthfully told. Why Victorians preferred to embrace the myth is one question that guides the book; why we continue to do so is another.”—The New Yorker “All too often, murder victims’ stories are relegated to the footnotes of history, overshadowed by not only their violent ends, but the looming specter of their killers. In The Five, historian Hallie Rubenhold sets out to correct this imbalance, placing the focus on [the victims] rather than the still-unidentified serial killer who ended their lives in 1888.”—Smithsonian “An effort to remedy the Ripper imbalance.”—Time “A must for Ripperologists.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review “Essential to students of Ripperiana.”—Kirkus Reviews “Focusing on [the victims] backstories rather than the forensic details of their deaths, Rubenhold puts them back into their larger social context.”—Jezebel “Jack the Ripper continues to be a mystery, but these women are now less so.”—Bust “Rubenhold does a commendable job in bringing these women on stage and through their stories illuminating the appalling reality behind the veneer of Victorian complacency. For these women, and millions like them, life in Victorian England was not an episode of Masterpiece Theater.”—New York Journal of Books “The Five is a long-overdue investigation that shines the spotlight on [the victims], giving context to who they were and what circumstances molded their lives.”—Hypable “At last, the Ripper's victims get a voice...An eloquent, stirring challenge to reject the prevailing Ripper myth." —The Mail on Sunday “[A]n angry and important work of historical detection…The Five is not simply about the women who were murdered in Whitechapel in the autumn of 1888: it is for them. This is a powerful and a shaming book, but most shameful of all is that it took 130 years to write.” —The Guardian "A remarkable feat of d —
Kirkus Reviews
2019-02-03
British social historian and novelist Rubenhold (The French Lesson, 2016, etc.) improves the reputations of "Jack the Ripper's five ‘canonical' victims."
Alcoholism, poverty, homelessness, abuse: London was awash in social problems in the later decades of the 19th century, a time when, as in New York, tenements were sprouting up, filled by immigrants and migrants from the countryside. Such was the setting against which the grimy life of Polly Nichols, the first victim of the legendary Jack the Ripper, played out. "The poor of that district lived in unspeakably horrendous conditions," writes the author. It was worse for women than men, since women were more constrained economically and often had multiple responsibilities as mothers and spouses as well as workers. Polly walked away from all that, addicted to alcohol, and took to the streets, where her murderer found her in 1888. "In death," writes Rubenhold, "she would become as legendary as the Artful Dodger, Fagin, or even Oliver Twist, the truth of her life as entangled with the imaginary as theirs." If the Dickensian emphasis is a touch overdone, the point remains: Polly would thereafter often be portrayed as merely a prostitute whose death was inevitable. So with the other four, who, argues the author, were not prostitutes and certainly were not complicit in the circumstances of their deaths, even though they have been depicted that way from the moment of their murders to the present—a matter of "guilt by association," the women left defenseless by the voicelessness of the poor and those who "broke all the rules of what it meant to be feminine." Allowing that the documentary record is incomplete—the case files on three of the five murders have gone missing—Rubenhold urges us to see the victims as just that and not as the "fallen women" of the received record.
A lively if morbid exercise in Victorian social history essential to students of Ripperiana.
