The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper
By: Hallie Rubenhold / Narrated By: Louise Brealey
Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
Very much wanted to love this, but… >Meh<
First off, lemme just say that I’m totally into Jack the Ripper and his victims. I’ve often wondered at how Fate was so cruel to choose these five women, from oodles of women, to be murdered and mutilated at his hands. So really, I was excited to get The Five when it went on sale at Audiobooks (2 for 1 credit sale). I would finally be able to get past the whole Jack Jack Jack thing (You know, how we elevate the evil to the status of gods and rock stars) and see who the MOST unfortunate women were. Author Hallie Rubenhold tells us up front that we’re not going to be getting accounts of the murders, and she shan’t be promoting any ideas of who the Ripper was; rather, it was all to be about the women, Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine, and Mary Jane and about how they were NOT lowdown and prostitutes, were deserving of respect, and…
blah blah blah
I KNOW! I’m dismissing them here. But sue me, this book dragged… when it wasn’t beating you over the head with how YOUR beliefs that they were prostitutes is WRONG, and YOU’RE WRONG, and so on and so forth to the point that I felt attacked for holding views which I most certainly do NOT hold. Of COURSE what happened to them was atrocious, vile, horrific, and shouldn’t have happened to anyone, no matter their status in society. But Rubenhold is so prickly through the entire book and does a lot of chest thumping and sermonizing, and by the end of the book, I could see why male reviewers were dashed done with the whole thing—found it to be feminist revisionism by a biased female historian. Now, I don’t go THAT far with my >MEH< but I did find the sermonizing exhausting.
Especially as, given the way the lives of each of the women played out, given the choices they had at hand (Very few!), I’m not sure that they weren’t prostitutes. What’s the difference between one of the women loudly setting up her tiny room to service men and the rest quietly walking the streets, or seeking protection by bedding a man/men? I dunno. All I can think is: Hey, if they were indeed prostitutes, don’t worry about it—they’re still worthy of affection and dignity and respect. But Rubenhold is ADAmant, so there you go. ExHAUSting…
What the author does do well, though, is bring Victorian life at the time to life, grimy, dismal, impoverished life. There were very few options for the poor, which was practically everyone as there was a huge distance between the few who had great wealth and the masses who were an illness, an accident, away from unemployment and homelessness. …Sound familiar…? Each of these five women had limited opportunities for a good and decent life, and bad fortune sent their lives reeling and had them doing stints in the workhouses, or out on the streets trying to avoid the workhouses like the plague. Slum life is vividly written, disease and filth, alcoholism (And each of the five had difficulties with alcohol and were known to get… loud and maybe even violent… whenst in their cups), all is well-researched, well-written. We come to see that what could be viewed as “bad choices” were actually, given life at the time, the ONLY choices.
And women had it baaaad, being seen as so much less than men.
Louise Brealey does a fine job with the narration, doesn’t much add to the text, but neither does she detract from it. Rather, it’s like listening to a smoothly-spoken documentary. Add Rubenhold’s obviously meticulous research, this is an okay documentary for the ears.
The book wraps up with an accounting of what was on their persons at autopsy, and that’s probably where you’ll find yourself feeling the greatest amount of sorrow for the women. It’s the little things the women kept, the little things that meant so much to them, a comb, a bit of mirror, a cloth for menstruation; all humanizes them so much.
It’s just that for me, and I know I know I know—this has gotten raaaave reviews, I didn’t feel much of a connection to the women given the moralizing. And none of them really stood out as individuals to me. Nope, if anything, I just got really bummed for all women of the time period.
Heck, I got really bummed out for all of us here and now: We’re all living from paycheck to paycheck, an illness, a pandemic, away from a world with few, if any, options…
As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.