The interesting thing about this book is the historical context that paints the common suffering of middle and lower class women in England in the time of Jack the Ripper. The book does not sell itself as the tale of The Ripper, nor as a new hypothesis about his presumed identity, but as a very intense look at the five women assumed murdered by Jack. On this promise, it delivers. One can see how a serial killer of the Ripper’s calibre would thrive in a society that treated its women this way, and the question arises about the responsibility of community and society, not only the Ripper, for the conditions and hardships these women were expected to suffer. In the end, their deaths almost seem a release from the daily struggle against pending death. It’s an incredible feat that any of these women survived, let alone gave birth multiple times to living infants, the conditions were so horrid; if a modern teen or young adult had to survive in a similar situation, they’d be dead quite young, with no help from a Ripper.

The unfolding of these stories makes one wonder if perhaps there even was a Ripper, that maybe these were five separate violent murders, provoked or accidental, premeditated or impulsive; one might understand how the anger and emotion and charged injustice spilled over into the night streets, crawling with desperate, hungry, dishevelled, and hopeless men and women who had resorted to animalistic behaviour, unbridled in their pursuit of vile passion, or the mere desire to forget the life they were cursed to continue living.

I didn’t come to this book looking for new insights about the Ripper, and that should be the furthest from the reader’s expectations, rather, I wanted to gain an understanding of the lives these women might have lived prior to their violent ends. It is full of this socio-cultural historical content in research-laden pages of insight, and a fair bit of educated assumptions, opening the reader’s eyes to the lecherous treachery of the 19th Century domestic and social realities that our predecessor sisters were forced to endure.

In a couple of these cases, it seems that spouse or snubbed lover may have been guilty of the murder, though in the age predating DNA evidence, this proof could not be pinned on these abusive, neglectful husbands, and in a day when a woman had no rights and little to sustain her if rejected by her man, it seems they got off with murder, with the convenient image of The Ripper at their disposal to cover their own crimes.

One can hardly blame these distraught women for seeking to disappear in the drink, if they had access to the mind-numbing substance. We’ll never know the truth of what happened those dark desperate nights in Whitechapel, but the assumptions drawn here can’t be far off reality.

It is a straightforward account written with easy-flowing style, and in conclusion, it circles back to its thesis statement; the author berates the culture that reveres the Ripper, calls the reader to poignantly recognise and put an end to the glorification of misogyny, and to stop giving voice to the fantastical victimiser.