The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper

"Yes. Also they become fetishised through the manner of their death. They’re just dismissed, sometimes (in this case) even categorised as sex workers. One of Rubenhold’s arguments is that one of the victims was a prostitute, but four of them were not. This is a deeply, deeply moving book built from very scant historical evidence. One of the reasons she wrote this was, these are women without voices; these are women who historical record obscures. What she’s done—through very, very good research, it strikes me—is fleshed out their stories by finding little bits of details about their lives, the lives of their families, their parents, their parents’ parents. She creates a narrative where you see people nearly escaping the fate of horrible poverty, but not quite. So it’s a tragic tale because there are moments in these women’s lives where they nearly get out; they nearly escape the misery that life has allotted to them. And then just a couple of things go wrong. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . What’s brilliant, I think, is that their death would be in some way incidental—if not for the fact that it gives a shared reason to write their stories together. They couldn’t escape that fate, but their lives are given dignity and colour. Otherwise it would just be: ‘Jack the Ripper killed people in this flamboyant fashion. Let’s all think about Jack the Ripper and go to a theme park based on it.’ It completely, completely writes against that tradition. Jack the Ripper is not in this book. We know how they die and that they die. And then the rest of it is: here are the lives of people, women, working class women, who are often written out of the history books. And this seems to me to be a brilliant and brave voicing of people who otherwise would be voiceless. That’s an interesting question. I think you can read anger into it . . . I mean, it’s clearly the case that they were given very little chance. That’s what so moving about it. There’s moments where they nearly, nearly defeat those odds. At some point, one of them reaches a good situation, gets into a good marriage, has kids. It looks like happiness is nearby, and then it falls away from her. Even if they’d succeeded, they would’ve succeeded only in the context of their own time, but they don’t even get that. You can get angry reading this book. I think there’s a relevance to how we perceive women, how we perceive victims, how we perceive sex workers especially, and how they can be dismissed—as if it’s reasonable not to care about the horrendous things that happened if the victims were sex workers. All of those political undertones are there, but it didn’t strike me as a political book and is all the stronger for it because it’s not just simply a manifesto. It’s actually a beautiful piece of history, that makes you think once you’ve put it down. Yes. To use that word again, it’s a really thrilling shortlist. One thing I have noticed is a certain, there’s a lot of ‘I’ in nonfiction now. People don’t, as a rule, write straight histories—they are encouraged to write their place into history, or into the context of the subject that they’re describing. There’s lots of, ‘here’s how I felt when I discovered X,’ or ‘here’s how Y affected my life.’ And in some ways I think that that’s rather laudable because it means people have a chance to write with feeling and personality. But I think there’s a risk that can become a cliché. The thing that occurs to me is that these books rise above all that. They tell a story where, if there is a personal connection, it is worthwhile—Laura Cumming being a really good example of that—and it adds to the book. The danger is, if you have people being encouraged to write breathily about their own experience, it can affect the quality of the research and the writing. So that’s the risk in nonfiction; there is a certain convergence of approach and tone. And that brings its own risks. Set against that though, I think there is some fantastic writing going on, some really, really fantastic, vibrant, exciting writing. This shortlist is a really good example of that. And I’m really pleased and proud that we’ve picked these six books because I don’t think you could ever say that they all straightforward or boring. There’s a lot of life in them and I think that’s what you want in any book, fiction or nonfiction: life, pulsing away. See all the recommendations in our best books of 2019 series."

"Jack the Ripper was a notorious late Victorian murderer who killed a number of women in the East End of London and has somehow inspired a very large literature, known colloquially as ‘Ripperology.’ The identity of the murderer was never discovered. He—and we assume it’s a he—partially dissected and eviscerated the women he murdered. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter This literature has assumed that the women he killed were prostitutes. Hallie Rubenhold, the author of The Five , has researched the lives of these five women absolutely brilliantly. It’s a great piece of detective work into some very obscure sources. She comes up with the absolutely convincing conclusion that only one of the women was a prostitute. The others were just rough sleepers, down on their luck; they were alcoholics or ill. She really disproves what the ‘Ripperologist’ literature says about the victims and recovers these women’s lives with a good deal of sympathy. It’s a moving book. It’s humane, it’s scholarly, and it challenges, from a feminist position, a whole library of books on Jack the Ripper. Yes, it lifts the lid on the underbelly of Victorian London and shows you these poor, downtrodden women really suffering—and then ending in this squalid way. Hallie Rubenhold has rescued them, to use Edward Thompson’s famous phrase, from “the enormous condescension of posterity.” It’s a very moving book."