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

Main characters

• Annie Chapman

  A woman whose respectable early life unraveled through loss, alcoholism and estrangement.

• Polly Nichols

  The first of the five, whose life Rubenhold traces from a London working-class family into addiction and homelessness.

• Elizabeth Stride

  A Swedish-born migrant who built and lost a new life in London.

• Catherine Eddowes

  A sharp, independent woman shaped by hardship in the industrial Midlands and London.

• Mary Jane Kelly

  The youngest and most elusive of the five, whose real history is the hardest to trace.