Overview

Five devastating human stories and a dark and moving portrait of Victorian London--the untold lives of the women killed by Jack the Ripper. 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, lived 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. The person responsible was never identified, but the character created by the press to fill that gap has become far more famous than any of these five women. For more than a century, newspapers have been keen to tell us that the Ripper preyed on prostitutes. Not only is this untrue, as historian Hallie Rubenhold has discovered, but it has prevented the real stories of these fascinating women from being told. Now, in this devastating narrative of five lives, Rubenhold finally sets the record straight, revealing a world not just of Dickens and Queen Victoria, but of poverty, homelessness, and rampant misogyny. They died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time--but their greatest misfortune was to be born a woman.

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9781665122184

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An angry and important work of historical detection. -- The Guardian (London) An eloquent, stirring challenge to reject the prevailing Ripper myth. -- Mail on Sunday (London) Jack the Ripper continues to be a mystery, but these women are now less so. - -- Bust magazine Rubenhold has produced a significant study of how poor and working-class women subsisted in an unforgiving age. -- New York Times Book Review [A] riveting work, both compassionate group portrait and stinging social history. -- Washington Post

Author Information

Hallie Rubenhold is a historian and broadcaster and an authority on British eighteenth-century social history. She has written two works of nonfiction to critical acclaim: The Convent Garden Ladies and Lady Worsley's Whim.In addition to writing books, articles, and reviews, Hallie regularly appears on television in the United Kingdom as an expert contributor to documentaries. She lives in London with her husband. Louise Brealey, AudioFile Earphones Award-winning narrator, studied history at Cambridge University before studying acting at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in Manhattan. On television, she appeared in the long-running medical drama Casualty on BBC One in 2002, appearing in ninety-six episodes. Afterwards, she appeared in the BBC serialization of Charles Dickens' Bleak House, as well as Hotel Babylon, Law & Order: UK, Ripper Street, and in all series of Sherlock as Molly Hooper.

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