Goodreads Choice Awards Book Club discussion

Winner of the History & Biography award



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

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.

I am picking this up from the library next week. I plan to read it as soon as I finish my current book. Who else has read this and what did you think? Is anyone else planning to read it this month?

I'm planning to do this as an audio book this month. I should be able to get it on the 7th and will start it then.

I read it earlier this year and like it a lot. Unfortunately, not a lot is known definitively about these women, so the book rests on a lot of speculation. These women were born with the deck stacked against them, and while they compounded that trouble with bad choices and/or addictions, it did not make them deserving of their awful fate. In this time and place in history, being born a woman was a challenge.

I absolutely adore this!! Such an informative yet important read as the women are rarely talked about further than just calling them sex workers

Georgie wrote: "I absolutely adore this!! Such an informative yet important read as the women are rarely talked about further than just calling them sex workers"

Agreed. I know they thought it would make the "upstanding citizens" feel safer, but it sounds like they were saying the women deserved it because they were prostitutes or at the least it was less of a loss. Pretty sad. I'm glad they are being humanized here.

It was an incredibly wonderful book. So much of the research was well done and so detailed. The women's lives were tragic. It was a worse hell then I ever could have imagined without it. It feels like any women that made it out of a work house or out of White chapel did so by sheer luck. In those places hard work wasn't going to help you. The deck was too stacked.

Just started this. Enjoying it so far. If anyone has Kindle Unlimited, this title is available for free.

I read this book a few months back and I thought it was wonderful... We often see books about the killer, but not the victims... But Hallie Rubenhold has stepped outside that box and focused on the victims... These were ordinary women who went through challenging times and when you read about them, you realise that most of their difficulties spawned from the fact they were born as women and made a few bad choices in an era when women hardly got second chances...

I am a quarter of the way through. I have finished Polly's story and I think we just started on Annie.

It is amazing to hear how these women lived back then and makes you so appreciative of how things are now for women. Definitely eye opening as far as that goes.

I am enjoying learning about the victims.

I finished this book last week. I didn’t love it, but I also did not hate it. I liked how the book was organized and the overall message of the book. The one thing I didn’t like was that to me it felt like I was reading a term paper rather than a novel. But the ending was really well done and brought everything together, which I really loved!

I really wanted to join you for this reading but I'm still number five in line at my library so I will probably not be able to read it until after new year.

I've finally got it from the library and have just started it so I'll come back soon! So happy that it's finally my turn, it is one of the most sought-after books at the library!

Look forward to reading your thoughts on it, Nike!

Kristie wrote: "Look forward to reading your thoughts on it, Nike!"

I love it so far but I haven't come very far yet, due to me being totally exhausted by every day issues lately. I promise I'll come back and report soon.

Oh, I can understand that. I hardly read at all in December and now my January is all backed up. No hurry.

Finally! I think it's such an important book and I admire Hallie Rubenhold for her extensive research! I'm impressed by how much information there is to gather from the 19'th century and it makes me realise that that century was so much more modern in many terms than I was aware of.
The most important thing is that it helps these women to regain their personalities and in some respect their lives.