Extraits

We have grown so comfortable with the notion of 'Jack the Ripper', the unfathomable, invincible male killer, that we have failed to recognize that he continues to walk among us. In his top hat and cape, wielding his blood-drenched knife, he can be spotted regularly in London posters, in ads, on the sides of buses. Bartenders have named drinks after him, shops use his moniker on their signs, tourists from around the world make pilgrimages to Whitechapel to walk in his footsteps and to visit a museum dedicated to his violence. The world has learned to dress up in his costume at halloween, to imagine being him, to honour his genius, to laugh at a murderer of women.

By embracing him, we embrace the set of values that surrounded him in 1888 which teaches women that they are a lesser value and can expect to be dishonoured and abused. We enforced the notion that 'bad women' deserve punishment and that 'prostitute' are a sub-species of female.

In order to keep him alive, we have to forget his victims.

At its very core, the story of Jack the Ripper is a narrative of a killer's deep, abiding hatred of women, and our cultural obsession with the mythology only serves to normalize its particular brand of misogyny.

My intention in writing this book is not to hunt and name the killer. I wish instead to retrace the footsteps of five women, to consider their experiences within the context of their era, and to follow their paths through both the gloom and the light.

[...]

The courses their lives took mirrored that of many other women of the Victorian age, and yet were so singular in the way they ended. It is for them that I write this book. I do so in the hope that we may now hear their stories clearly and give back to them that which was so brutally taken away with their lives: their dignity.