This book came highly recommended by my sister, so when I got round to reading it I wasn’t sure what to expect (we don’t normally have the same taste in books). However, The Five by Hallie Rubenhold was such a welcome surprise. I went in thinking I knew the infamous Jack the Ripper story – gruesome murders, a faceless killer, foggy Victorian streets. What I got instead was a powerful, humanising portrait of the women whose lives he stole. I finished this book feeling equal parts enlightened, angry, and deeply moved.
This isn’t a lurid true crime tale rehashing the gory details. In fact, the murders are barely mentioned at all. The Five flips the narrative on its head: it’s not about the murderer at all, but about his victims – Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Kate and Mary Jane. Rubenhold tells their stories with such warmth and dignity that you almost feel like you’ve met them. By the end, they’re not just names in a Victorian police ledger; they’re five complex, vibrant women, who laughed, cried, struggled and dreamed. And wow – it was about time someone told their story like this.
So what did I love about this book? I’ll try to keep it to just three!:
Reclaiming Their Stories With Compassion
First off, the reclamation of these women’s lives is nothing short of extraordinary. Rubenhold gives each of the “canonical five” – Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly – a voice and a history. She delves into their childhoods, their jobs, their families, their heartbreaks. By doing so the book shifts the spotlight away from the killer and onto the lives of his victims. I can’t overstate how refreshing and poignant this felt.
Reading The Five, I realised how little I (and most people) actually knew about these women beyond the manner of their deaths. Here, they become real, flesh-and-blood people. Polly was a mother of five who fell on hard times after the collapse of her marriage; Annie was a hopeful wife who battled addiction; Elizabeth escaped tragedy in Sweden seeking a better life in London; Kate was a lively soul who loved to sing; Mary Jane was young and down on her luck, still searching for a safe place. Each story is reconstructed with empathy, as if Rubenhold is saying to them, “I see you. Your life mattered”.
The tone throughout the book is deeply compassionate. There’s no salacious glee in recounting what happened to them – in fact, the book pointedly avoids detailed descriptions of the murders altogether. Instead, it asks the far more important question: Who were these women, and how did life in Victorian London pave the path that led them into harm’s way? By the end, I felt extremely connected to these women, not just geographically, us all having walked the same streets, but also intertwined in terms of societal expectations and values ascribed to women.
Shattering the Misogynistic Myth
Another thing I loved (and also slightly raged over) was how this book blows apart the misogynistic myth that “Jack the Ripper only killed prostitutes”. For over a century, people have clung to this narrative that all his victims were sex workers, as if that somehow explains or justifies their fates. The Five exposes how wrong – and how deeply unfair – that story is. In reality, there’s no solid evidence that three of the five women were ever sex workers at all. But because they were all poor, homeless, or struggling, Victorian society (and the media, and the police) slapped the prostitute label on them to fit a tidy moral tale.
Reading about this made my blood boil. These women were judged as “fallen” and thus considered less worthy – both in 1888 and, shockingly, by many history books since. Rubenhold systematically dismantles this narrative. She shows that the Victorian values of the time (deeply patriarchal and priggish) led authorities to assume any woman found murdered on the street must have been selling sex. It was easier to paint the victims as immoral undesirables than to admit the truth: that a killer was preying on vulnerable women society didn’t protect. By challenging this, the book doesn’t just correct the facts – it forces us to confront the prejudice behind the old narrative.
I found myself cheering (and seething) as Rubenhold recounted how, at one inquest, the coroner pried into whether Polly Nichols was “clean” in her habits – essentially probing if she was a prostitute as if that would make her murder somehow less tragic. It’s infuriating and heartbreaking. The Five calls out this injustice loud and clear. It exposes how labeling these victims as “just prostitutes” allowed people then (and even now) to dismiss their suffering. In doing so, it challenges us, the readers, to check our own assumptions. Why did we so readily accept that story? And what does it say about how society views “good” women versus “bad” women? This aspect of the book sparked so much reflection for me. It’s a searing reminder of how misogyny can warp the stories we tell about women – and how it’s never too late to set the record straight.
Extraordinary Social History, Vividly Told
The history nerd in me was absolutely delighted by the extraordinary social history woven through this book. If “working-class women’s lives in 19th century Britain” doesn’t immediately sound thrilling, trust me – Rubenhold will change your mind. The level of research here is mind-blowing, yet it never feels dry. Instead, the details of Victorian life are delivered in such a vivid, relatable way that you feel like you’ve been transported to 1880s London (and not the posh parlours – we’re talking the grimy East End streets, bustling lodging houses, and cramped workhouses).
I learned so much without ever feeling like I was being lectured. For example, Rubenhold paints a stark picture of how few options women like Polly or Annie had. We see how a woman who left an abusive husband or lost her family might end up in a workhouse because there were literally no safety nets. There’s a part discussing how divorce laws were absurdly stacked against women – one quote that stuck with me explained that while a husband could divorce a wife for adultery, a wife had to prove adultery and an additional crime like cruelty or incest to leave her husband. Imagine that frustration! It’s details like these that illuminate just how society was rigged against women of their class.
The book also brings to light the everyday indignities these women faced. One passage recounts a social reformer who dressed as a poor woman and was horrified by how men treated her when she wasn’t in “respectable” clothes – a chilling glimpse at the casual harassment destitute women endured. From the overcrowded slums of Whitechapel to the harsh realities of factory work and casual labor, The Five sets the scene so we understand the world these women navigated. By the end, I felt like I had a much clearer picture of Victorian London’s underbelly – and it made me appreciate the strength and resilience these five women showed in simply surviving as long as they did. It’s social history with a heartbeat, and it makes the book so much more than just a recounting of crimes. It’s a time machine and a social justice lesson rolled into one.
Final Thoughts
It’s not often that a non-fiction book manages to tug at the heartstrings. I expected a true crime angle, but The Five is really a feminist historical revelation. Hallie Rubenhold’s writing is engaging and accessible, yet backed by rigorous research. (She spent years digging through archives to resurrect these stories and it shows). There’s a real narrative drive here; each woman’s tale is told almost like a mini-novel, minus any sensationalism. And even though were know how their lives tragically end, the focus never wavers from celebrating who they were rather than how they died. That, to me, is the most poignant triumph of this book.
While reading, I kept thinking about our culture’s obsession with serial killers and how often we remember their names but not the names of their victims. This book turns that habit on its head, and it kind of humbled me. It made me ask: why did it take over 130 years for these women to get a book of their own? The outrage I felt on their behalf was matched only by gratitude that someone finally did them justice. I felt heartbroken at how society failed these five women in life and in legacy, but fired up by the thought that remembering and honouring them is a way of quietly saying “screw you” to the Ripper and the misogyny that fed his legend.
Highly, highly recommend. This book is more than a book about Victorian history or a notorious crime – it’s a reclamation, a tribute, and a damn important read. If you’re into women’s history, true crime, social justice, or just love a book that challenges the way you think, please grab The Five. I honestly think Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Kate and Mary Jane would be glad that we are finally listening to their stories.
Books With Megz 