Hallie Rubenhold

The Five refuses to write about Jack the Ripper. It reconstructs the lives of Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary Jane instead, and argues from the evidence that three of them were not sex workers at all, only homeless women asleep when they were killed, a distinction Victorian police and a century of Ripper enthusiasts had not troubled with. Ripperologists were furious, and the book took the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2019. Rubenhold trained as a social historian and worked as a museum curator; her earlier books are about eighteenth-century sex and reputation.