This book starts its journey with BookCrossing from Delphi, Greece
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"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.
Their murderer was never identified, but the name created for him by the press has become far more famous than any of these five women.

Now, in this devastating narrative of five lives, historian Hallie Rubenhold finally sets the record straight, and gives these women back their stories. "



~~~~~~To the person who found this book:~~~~~~

Welcome to BookCrossing.com, where we are trying to make the whole world a library!

If you have not already done so, please make a journal entry so we know this book has found a new home. Drop a few lines on where and how you found this book and what you thought of it. You don't need to join BookCrossing and you can remain completely anonymous. However, I encourage you to join so that you can follow this book's future travels. It's fun and free, and your personal information will never be shared or sold.

This book is now yours, and you can keep it if you choose, although I would love you to read and then share it. You can pass it on someone you know or release it once again in the wild, leaving it on a park bench, a phone booth, a hostel lobby...wherever you think it's suitable for the book to continue it's journey. If you pass it along, please make a release note to let others know where you left it.

I hope you enjoy the book!

This was a very interesting book, as much a narration of the life stories of the women killed by "Jack the Ripper" as a description of the horrendous living conditions of the poor/lower classes on Victorian London and as much a sharp criticism on the double standards for men and women and the misogyny and prejudices of the era.

Hallie Rubenhold can get very informative about various subjects and about the five women as far as there is some information to be found, but often when there is no sources available and no solid evidence for part of their lives, the narration is filled by lots of speculating and assuming.

The book is quite captivating but at times I found the tone a bit annoying. It could easily shift between matter of factish narration to literature-like descriptions of potential feelings of the victims to a teaching tone about the social conditions at the time. While there are parallelisms among the five women's stories, so some repetition about their surroundings and experiences is unavoidable, I felt that the author got a too repetitive sometimes. She kept touching on the same issues and detailed descriptions of institutions and lodging houses and streets and beliefs and manners of people again and again. Furthermore there are a couple of small inconsistencies I noticed here and there, for example, Polly appears brown-eyed at the start of her story while she has grey eyes at the moment of her death.

There is adequate material -given the circumstances- to research about some of the women, while little information is known for others, so the author filled the gaps with lots of stuff that could or could not be relevant, especially on Mary Jane's chapters but all over the book really... Another thing that irked me somehow is that while Hallie Rubenhold naturally states that it doesn't matter if these women were prostitutes or not, they should be respected and appreciated as whole human beings and not by one trait, she spends a very good part of the book to claim if they were or they were not prostitutes, which is very hard to know afterall.

Last but not least, exactly to make a point, the author didn't focus much at the murders of these women. She described their lifes till the very last moment and then added a couple of lines like an epilogue to one's life story, how their bodies were found and where they were buried etc. Maybe rightly so, but still I felt she could expand a bit without compromising her statement that this is a book about them and not their murderer and that they had a life and other identities rather than been simply victims of the killer. She very fleetingly mentions a theory about the murders anyway, that possibly the women were killed while they were sleeping.

All in all, a very interesting read, maybe a bit tiring to read in one go, but informative and at times touching non the less...

PS: This kind of book requires lots of back-office work to decipher and cross-reference tons of archieves, boring buraucratic documents etc. Often the authors get all the credit while they have assistants doing all the hard and tendious but necessary stuff. If not doing all the work, at least sharing the burden. If I read correctly between the lines, I feel that this intern historian from University of York, Sarah Murphy, should get direct acknowledgements her self, rather than the person who "sent" her over.

This book got itchy feet and wants to explore the whole wild world. So, for a start it'll travel to meet the winner or decoy of the Non fiction Sweepstakes - Round 17!
And then... Who knows?

Good Luck little book and Don't forget to write your news from time to time!

Book received. Thank you.

P. S.: the postmarks of Greece are amazing.

Reserved for The Non-Fiction Sweepstakes.

Exchanged to other book in book store Novaya R/ga (Krišjāņa Valdemāra iela 17A).