Hallie Rubenhold's 'The Five' Offers a New Perspective on Jack the Ripper

My intention in writing this book is not to hunt and name the killer. I wish instead to retrace the footsteps of five women, to consider their experiences within the context of their era, and to follow their paths through both the gloom and the light. They are worth more to us than the empty human shells we have taken them for; they were children who cried for their mothers, they were young women who fell in love; they endured childbirth, the death of parents; they laughed, and they celebrated Christmas. They argued with their siblings, they wept, they dreamed, they hurt, they enjoyed small triumphs. Hallie Rubenhold, author of The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper.

“They’re answers in a pub quiz and that’s wrong. I found it beyond injustice that these women were defined solely by the way they died, while their killer was elevated to mythology.” Ian Bell, composer of the opera Jack the Ripper: The Women of Whitechapel.

Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elisabeth Stride, Kate Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly: You may not know their names, but you know who they are. They are the victims of one of the most famous - and most often obsessed over - serial killers in history. A man known only as Jack the Ripper.

And history can no longer write these women off, at best as prostitutes, at worst as women who somehow deserved their fate. Most of them weren’t young, they weren’t sexy, and poverty and disease had destroyed any earlier prettiness they may have possessed. Mary Jane Kelly, in her late twenties, was the youngest. And their stories deserve to be told.