THE FIVE: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed By Jack the Ripper - Book Review

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THE FIVE: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed By Jack the Ripper is a non-fiction book written by historian Hallie Rubenhold, it was published on the 28th of February 2019, by Double Day.

The book has been shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize for 2020, and won the 2019, Baillie Gifford Prize, and is The Sunday Times Bestseller.

In the book Hallie Rubenhold examines the lives of the "canonical five", the five women generally believed to have been killed by Jack the Ripper in the Whitechapel murders in 1888. She came to the conclusion that only 2 of the 5, Mary Jane Kelly and Elizabeth Stride, were in fact prostitutes. In some cases they may have been targeted by the Ripper just because they were sleeping rough.

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, live 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.

Their murderer was never identified, but the name created for him by the press has become more famous than any of these women.

In this devastating narrative of five lives, historian Hallie Rubenhold finally gives these women back their stories.

Ever since I was a little girl, as odd as it may sound, I've always been interested in the Jack the Ripper story and like everyone else is was Jack the eluding Jack the Ripper himself that intrigued me, so when I saw this book my interest was piqued again. But this time for a whole new reason, how many of us can say that when we thought about this shocking moment in time, we actually thought about these 5 women being nothing other than "prostitutes", did you ever sit back and think about what their lives were really like before their murders? I know I didn't, my interest was in Jack the Ripper and how he got away with 5 gruesome and disturbing murders.

I can honestly say that this book really opened my eyes and made me think more about these women, than a man who was seriously disturbed with some sort of mental issues towards women. For the first time, these 5 women were in the forefront, and it really made me think about how hard these women had it once they got sucked into the darkness. It was actually nice and heart warming actually reading about their lives, about how they were someone's daughter, wife and mother, something that's never once thought about once you mention their murderers name.

In no way did I ever think these women deserved to be murdered because they were labelled "prostitutes", they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Reading this book also made me realise how hard women have fought and how far women have come to be socially accepted as members of society and not just as breeders for their men. But at the same time we still have a long way to go, one thing reading this book I have noticed hasn't changed is how women and men are treated in certain situations, a man sleeps around and he's the man, the bees knees, but if it's a woman, then she's labelled a whore, a slag. If a woman is raped, what she was wearing, how she was acting is looked at before she is believed. But sadly at the same time men do not come forward when it comes to rape or abuse because they're embarrassed, and feel less like a man, because they have to be stronger than a woman.

We're often told not to judge a book by it's cover and these 5 women are the perfect example of that, would you assume that a homeless woman sleeping in the street was a prostitute and selling her body for money? If not then why were and should these women in their deaths be labelled prostitutes, even when these women died and their families and friends were spoken to they were still labelled as prostitutes, even when their death certificates don't have that as their label.

Whenever I think of Jack the Ripper now, my first thoughts head to the women that he so brutally murdered and butchered. 

I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the Jack the Ripper story and never once thought about how these women fell into this murderous mans hands. Everyone talks about the murderer but no-one actually talks and thinks about who these women really were.

Have you read THE FIVE: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed By Jack the Ripper?

What were your thoughts on the book?

Let me know in the comments below.

See you soon!

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