Five

The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper

No cover

Hallie Rubenhold: Five (2020, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Trade & Reference Publishers)

352 pages

English language

Published Nov. 10, 2020 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Trade & Reference Publishers.

ISBN:
978-0-358-29961-5
Copied ISBN!

View on OpenLibrary

4 stars (3 reviews)

8 editions

An important book with a purpose, but still too much conjecture.

4 stars

The overall intent of this book was to re-humanize the victims of Jack the Ripper. This was definitely needed since the victims have been completely overshadowed with our obsession with the Ripper himself. Rubenhold does succeed in a sense with this attempt, but the biggest issue is that there's still far too many gaps that are attempted to be filled in with (educated) guesses. It is clarified when something is assumed and not fact, but it takes away from the initial claim of the book.

Rubenhold starts off stating that the victims were not prostitutes and deserve to have their honor cleared up. But the reality is that almost all were prostitutes at some point, but they were not believed to have been prostitutes when their lives were taken from them. There is a heavy emphasis on how skewed the mentalities were towards women during the time frame, and a …