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

The Five belongs to a specific sub-genre of historical nonfiction known as “microhistory.” A microhistory focuses on a specific event or individual in history who is not considered a major political, cultural, or intellectual figure. Microhistories thus often focus on “history from below,” representing traditionally marginalized groups such as women, racial minorities, the working class, or the poor. Microhistories seek to illuminate elements and trends in a given time period from new and overlooked angles. An example of such a microhistory would be one that examines the life of the daughter of an artisan in Tudor England, instead of a biography of Queen Elizabeth I.

Some notable examples of microhistory include Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812, Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, Judith M. Bennett’s A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader and the World of English Peasants Before the Plague, and Jonathan D. Spence’s The Death of Woman Wang. The Five is something of an unusual example, as Jack the Ripper’s victims are far from unknown. However, Rubenhold makes the case that the actual lives of the “canonical” five victims of