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

I thought this would be about the victims of Jack the Ripper, but the author has used them to discuss Victorian life in banal tones. The victims deserved better than this. The book is full of dubiously sourced information, contradictions, and outright inventions.

I forgot my copy of the book at home when I went on vacation, I was so sad about it that I had to buy an ebook copy so I could finish it. An upside to the ebook is that I could click on the footnotes and read them directly, instead of flipping back and forth in the physical book. Jack the Ripper's victims are often dismissed as being prostitutes. Only one actually was, another was first mistaken as one which ruined her life and in turn led to her becoming one. The latter was Swedish, I had no idea. These were just women who fell on hard times. Some of them had pretty good lives at least at some point. The author has done so much research to find everything there is to know about these women's lives, and fill the book out with more relevant historical, political and cultural information. It paints a very vivid picture. I love that each part ends where her life did, we don't need to read how it ended, we've heard so much about it elsewhere. This book is about their lives. “The victims of Jack the Ripper were never 'just prostitutes'; they were daughters, wives, mothers, sisters, and lovers. They were women. They were human beings, and surely that in itself is enough.” Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Kate and Mary Jane, rest in peace, you will not be forgotten.

Author makes massive leaps of assumption. None of the photos bar one can be proven to be genuine....in a word fantasy!