"The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper" by Hallie Rubenhold

I really don't know what was I thinking - probably because for such a long time we took Jack the Ripper story as some exciting thriller and unsolved crime story, we became kind of conditioned to approach it as entertainment: historian Hallie Rubenhold took completely new and fresh approach, where she completely skipped killer himself and focused exclusively on the victims, trying to explain who they were, giving them names and explaining their background."They are worth more to us than the empty human shells we have taken them for; they were children who cried for their mothers, they were young women who fell in love; they endured childbirth, the death of parents; they laughed, and they celebrated Christmas. They argued with their siblings, they wept, they dreamed, they hurt, they enjoyed small triumphs. The courses their lives took mirrored that of so many other women of the Victorian age, and yet were so singular in the way they ended."  For Rubenhold the identity of the murderer and all the grisly details are not important - they were excessively covered in many other places previously and we know too well how the mutilated bodies looked like when they were found - she decidedly focuses on lives not the deaths of five victims and tries to explain what was the reality of life in Victorian London. 

Perhaps this book could not have been written earlier - it took a writer with modern sensibilities to look closer at the identity of victims and see them as a real human beings and not just crime statistics. Each of them was somebody's child, wife, lover and even (in some cases) mother. You can almost feel the tears of rage when Rubenhold discusses that they were probably not even prostitutes but homeless women - the fact that for some reason means a lot to her but does not change anything - what comes out very vividly is description of poverty and homelessness on the streets of London at the time. It is extremely detailed and often exhausting story - we learn a lot of ugly facts - each of these women starts relatively fine and than sinks in despair of poverty, alcoholism, homelessness, etc - I must be honest and admit that halfway trough the book it became quite repetitious and bleak. Kudos to Rubenhold for not trying to whitewash anything - she might have sympathise with these unfortunate women but she still gives pretty clear-eyed description of how self-destructive they were.

It was bleak and gloomy read. It could have not been otherwise, being about homeless and desperately poor alcoholics. These women were basically victims from the start but as Rubenhold points, there always was way out - marriage, service job, any job, moving to another town, etc - unfortunately many of them succumbed to alcohol addiction and ended up in a gutter. I read this with a knot in my stomach and now need something completely different, something entertaining.