The book's divided into five sections, each telling the life story of one of the canonical victims of Jack the Ripper. They're clearly the result of intense archival research, and Rubenhold pieced together census information, workhouse records, newspaper articles, inquests, and the like to uncover so many details. The idea that all five women were sex workers came from the prejudices of the middle-class Victorian world: in reality, most of them were involved with men they weren't married to in long-term monogamous relationships (a necessity for lower-working-class women, who rarely earned enough to support themselves) and were out at night because they were sleeping rough as they lacked the money for a bed in a doss house. Most of the sections show the way that one or two stumbles could force a family into the cycle of poverty, and the toll that alcoholism could take on a marriage or a life.

There are times when it feels like Rubenhold is stretching a tad in order to say what emotion a person would have been feeling, but overall it's both engaging and intellectually rigorous. The research is like what I did for an exhibition several years ago, but turned up to 11 (which is something, in fairness to me, you can only do for record-keeping institutions in urban environments and with the ability to travel around), so I really appreciate the incredible amount of time and effort put in.

The common thread with this, Lady W, and Covent Garden Ladies is Rubenhold's interest in women outside the norm/ideal of their time, in terms of sexual behavior. She always treats them sympathetically and as people with agency, yet at the same time without the insistence I sometimes see that this existence was necessarily freeing. It might be nice not to feel like you had to conform, but at the same time it was not nice to have "respectable" family members shun you, landlords force you out of your lodgings, and public officials treat you with scorn and disgust, not to mention to deal with any self-inflicted pain due to internalized misogyny/prejudice against sexually-active women.