Five Lives: The Untold Stories of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper
19.99 €
Out of stock
Five Lives: The Untold Stories of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper
19.99 €
A book about the women murdered by Jack the Ripper, based on five striking human stories and a dark, disturbing portrait of Victorian London. Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary Jane went down in history together, although they never met. They were born in Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee shops, lived in summer cottages, inhaled ink from printing presses and escaped traffickers. They were killed in the same year: 1888. The killer was never found, but the character the press created to fill the gap became far more famous than any of the five women. For more than a century, newspapers unanimously claimed that the Ripper preyed on prostitutes. Historian Holly Rubenhold found that untrue and set out to tell the real stories of the women. Her ruthless narrative takes us into a world not only of Dickens and Queen Victoria, but also of poverty, homelessness and rampant misogyny. In this profound, moving, documentary and wonderfully literary story, Rubenhold does not present her heroines as saints, but tells of them as a phenomenon of society, showing the consequences of limiting freedom of choice. And this is something that still affects people's lives today.
See also:
- All books by the publisher
- All books by the author