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#BroaderBookshelf Book Group
Wednesday, September 7, 2022 7 p.m. – 8 p.m.
Each month, the #BroaderBookshelf book group tackles one of the prompts of the book challenge. This month, we will cover "Read a book with a number in the title".
Join us for a virtual book group discussion of this month’s title, The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold. . Click here to see the available formats. This title is also available for immediate download as an eaudiobook and ebook from Hoopla.
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Five devastating human stories and a dark and moving portrait of Victorian London--the untold lives of the women killed by Jack the Ripper.
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. The person responsible was never identified, but the character created by the press to fill that gap has become far more famous than any of these five women.
For more than a century, newspapers have been keen to tell us that "the Ripper" preyed on prostitutes. Not only is this untrue, as historian Hallie Rubenhold has discovered, it has prevented the real stories of these fascinating women from being told. Now, in this devastating narrative of five lives, Rubenhold finally sets the record straight, revealing a world not just of Dickens and Queen Victoria, but of poverty, homelessness and rampant misogyny. They died because they werein the wrong place at the wrong time--but their greatest misfortune was to be born a woman.