
The Five
The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
3 months free
Buy for $17.49
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Louise Brealey
-
By:
-
Hallie Rubenhold
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.
©2019 Hallie Rubenhold (P)2019 HighBridge, a division of Recorded BooksListeners also enjoyed...




















People who viewed this also viewed...


















Thank you for enlightening me to the lives of Mary Anne, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine, and Mary Jane before they were so savagely cut down.
Consider me informed.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Wonderfully written
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Man What a Good Book!
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The Lives of the 5 Victims of Jack the Ripper
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
incredible
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Amazing
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Wow
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Just wow!!
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The narration will take at least a chapter to get used to, as Louise Brealey’s British accent is heavier than I expected, but she was the perfect choice to read this because you can hear in her accent how the people in the book may have sounded in real life. She has a good ear for the regional dialects and the vocal class distinctions that even today are recognizable on BBC period dramas and in daily English life.
Be prepared to hear some grotesque facts of mid to late 19th century life, though she does not describe the murders themselves in detail, since that has been widely documented and dramatized from police reports, coroner’s reports and sensationalized newspaper accounts. Instead the brutal reality of just finding a place to sleep and enough food, as well as the sanitation situation in Victorian Europe as well as the ugliness of syphillis and the horrors of the workhouses is expounded upon in some depth.
A long-needed fresh perspective
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
An eye opening account
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.