The five

Jack the Ripper's victims

Author Name: Halle Rubenhold

Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine, and Mary Jane were famous for one thing in common, even though they had never met. They came from different places: Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden, and Wales. They wrote stories, ran coffee shops, lived on country estates, worked in printers amidst the dust of ink, and fled from white slave traders. But what they all had in common was 1888, the year they were murdered. To this day, their killer has never been identified, as the notoriety of the "Ripper" created by the press to fill the vacuum of truth has overshadowed the identities of these five women.
For more than a century, newspapers promoted the idea that the Ripper targeted prostitutes, which was not only inaccurate—as historian Hallie Rubenhold has revealed—but also obscured the real, deeply moving stories of these women.
In this profound and harrowing account of five lives, Rubenhold sets the record straight, revealing a world unlike that of Dickens or Queen Victoria; a world filled with poverty, homelessness, and rampant misogyny. They died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, but the deeper tragedy was that they were born women into a society that didn't give them a chance at life.