This book was phenomenal. It was so cleverly written, thoroughly researched, and interesting! Wow. Just wow! Rubenhold has done an incredible job of taking the scant information surrounding these girls and turned them into real people rather than just stories. Real women facing real hardships who have been overlooked and largely forgotten by the world.
I was very surprised at the harsh parallels between Victorian Britain and today - it was disturbing and deeply upsetting to hear of a familiar pattern of poverty, homelessness and prejudice that is still plaguing our country to this day.
History and fiction has largely focused on the Ripper, giving the status closer to a sensationalised celebrity than vicious murderer. As Rubenhold notes, 'By embracing him, we embrace the set of values that surrounded him in 1888.' With all the focus on 'him', the tragedy and story of the victims has fallen into the background and are largely overlooked nowadays. I really appreciate this version of history that gives the women that voice they deserve.

A very interesting and eye opening book about the victims of Jack the Ripper and the social climate of that era.
I liked that this book really focused on the women; who they were, what we know of their lives rather than about who Jack the Ripper may have been.
Jack the Ripper has become this romanticized figure, but this book reminds us that his victims were real people and they came to see and unfortunate ends.

So often we hear stories of the murderer, but nothing of the victims. This author tells us the back story, fortunately omitting grisly details, of the five women thought to have been murdered in the late 1880’s by a serial killer called Jack the Ripper. These women were all pretty much homeless and alcoholic which was “entirely overlooked as a factor in their murders; a ‘houseless creature’ and a ‘prostitute’ by their moral failings were one and the same.” Their world was one of “poverty, homelessness, and misogyny,” where it was especially difficult for women who were either on their own or in an abusive relationship to survive. It was disturbing to read that some self-righteous Victorian men opined that this murderer was doing a service to society; Rubinhold’s extensive research reveals that “they died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time—but [that] their greatest misfortune was to be born a woman.” Readers interested in women’s history, particularly during the Victorian period, would undoubtedly enjoy this fascinating book.

A fascinating recovered history of Jack the Ripper's 'canonical victims' which finally turns the lens from the figure of their murderer, which cannot be known, to the women he killed, who can. Rubenhold does fascinating recovery work here, and the change in emphasis really reshapes this well-known story. Rubenhold makes them human in looking at their lives beyond the moment of their deaths and the aftermath of their autopsies, in showing them to be more than 'prostitutes' who met the wrong man one foggy night. What's fascinating is not only that these lives have not been centred in the myth of the Ripper and past popular and even scholarly studies, but that what evidence Rubenhold finds is both, amazingly, there to be found, and so fragile, so relatively sparse, and so much detail has been irrecoverably lost. Even what survives would never have drawn attention, if they had not died when and how they did.

This is a fascinating look at the five victims of Jack the Ripper — all of whom have been somewhat lost in the shadow of The ripper. Rubenhold has done an amazing amount of research to tell these women’s stories and to set the record straight about who they were and how they came to be in a position to be victims of this terrible crime.

Ultimately, this is the story of the poor (and particularly the poor women) of the 19th century.