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, Elisabeth, Catherine, and Mary Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met.
They died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time--but their greatest misfortune was to be born women..
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.
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.
For more than a century, newspapers have been keen to tell us that the Ripper preyed on prostitutes.
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.
What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888.
They wrote ballads, ran coffeehouses, lived on country estates; they breathed ink dust from printing presses and escaped human traffickers.
They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden, and Wales.
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, Elisabeth, Catherine, and Mary Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met
