Includes bibliographical references and index.

"The untold story of the women killed by Jack the Ripper--and a gripping portrait of Victorian London--[this book] changes the narrative of these murders forever. Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Catherine, and Mary jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from some of London's wealthiest and poorest neighborhoods, from teh favtory towns of middle England, and from Wales and Sweden. They wrote ballads, rand coffeehouses, lived on country estates; they breatheed ink dust from printiing presses and escaped human traffickers. What they had in common was the yeaer of their murders: 1888. The person responsible was never identified, but the character cretaed 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, but it was prevented the real stories of these facinating women form being told. Now, by drawing on a wealth of formerly unseen archiavl material and adding full historical context to the victim's' lvives, Rubenhold finally sets the record straight, revealing a world not jsut of Dickens and Queen Victoria, but of poverty, homelessness an drrampant msogyne. They died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time--but their greatest misfortune was to be born women."-- Jacket.