The Jack the Ripper case is likely the most notorious series of murders in history, adapted into countless reproductions and theorised on endlessly, but in historian Hallie Rubenhold’s “The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper”, we are presented with the humanity and and heart wrenching accounts of the victims instead of another sensational drool over the bloody murders. Rubehold’s work is a devastating and intimate portrayal of these women’s lives and the ways the system, what it was of workhouses and meagre pensions paid in a husband’s name as long as he was alive, was not one made for women. Rubenhold effectively strips away the spectre of the notorious Jack the Ripper to provide us with an intimate portrayal of the victims’ devastating lives.
Rubenhold tells the complete story of each woman’s life, from birth to death, as much as it can be known and in so doing she is able to present whole women. “The Five” opens with the first victim, Polly, the infamous drunk, but we learn she was more than that – she was a wife and mother, a woman who would never have been killed if the justice woman allowed a woman to divorce her husband because he was sleeping with the neighbour. Her options were to stay, her husband and his girlfriend openly having a relationship in front of her, or leave to the workhouse. Her children would have to stay behind. We forget what it means to have no options.
We’re often more concerned with hearing the gory details of the murder instead of the lives lived by the victims, this is the issue with most true crime content. Rubenhold deftly guides the reader to the most likely moment the victims encountered their killer, but there are no violent, bloody details of the murder.
Each account tells the story of how it doesn’t take much to derail a woman’s life. The most vulnerable have always been those who are one illness, one traumatic event, one death, away from homelessness. Rubenhold shows us over and over again, through these five women, what it means not to protect them.
Recommended for readers interested in history, women’s experience, and true crime that is approached ethically and without judgement or sensationalism.
Additional resources on this case include the Jack the Ripper miniseries by History Hit podcast, After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds, and the Paranormal. Anthony and Maddy provide a close examination of the most likely suspects in the Jack the Ripper murders. Much like the women, these men were on the fringes of society in their own way (save the Prince).
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