Even so, moments of great poignancy occur. This book contains many passages that are well nigh brutal in their depiction of what living in poverty did to these women. As many as 48.9 percent of English women of the ‘lower classes’ could not read or write.
They often stayed in rooming houses that were at best insalubrious, sharing rooms, and even beds, with strangers. They had a child, or children, whom they worked to support and protect. They got caught in destructive marriages or relationships. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden, and Wales. Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. What it is most definitely not about is Jack the Ripper. The book is about the lives of those five individuals up until the time of their respective demises in 1888. The Five is subtitled, The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper. As soon as people hear those last three words they recoil in horror. I’ve learned to stop describing this book as being about the five women murdered by Jack the Ripper.
Jat 2:16 pm ( Book review, books, True crime) ‘They began their lives in deficit.’ – The Five, by Hallie Rubenhold
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