The Ladies of Whitechapel: London. 1888. Their Stories.
£1.90
Enter the narrow dark alleys of Victorian London, where women sold their bodies for pennies, and the rich preyed among the weak!
In the dark lanes, away from the hustle and bustle of Whitechapel High Street, four women live their lives. But someone is watching – and waiting.
In 1888, five victims of Jack the Ripper became famous for their horrific fate. That same year, police ignored many other women’s murders because of their class, or in an attempt to dispel the idea of a serial killer loose in Whitechapel.
Discover the forgotten women of Whitechapel: from heiress to whore, from wife to murderer – four woven tales of women struggling to survive the terror of Jack the Ripper’s reign.
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Additional information
| Publisher | darkstroke books (25 Mar. 2020) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| File size | 887 KB |
| Simultaneous device usage | Unlimited |
| Text-to-Speech | Enabled |
| Screen Reader | Supported |
| Enhanced typesetting | Enabled |
| X-Ray | Not Enabled |
| Word Wise | Enabled |
| Sticky notes | On Kindle Scribe |
| Print length | 153 pages |
by flo
A really clever telling of four of the possible additional Ripper victims. Bloom weaves fact with fiction to give these ladies a voice and a semblance of a backstory.
As others have mentioned, the editing has a lot of room for improvement; especially in the latter two tales.
Overall a worthy read for Kindle Unlimited users but I wouldn’t have paid for it.
by Rhydderch Wilson
Page turner..I was engrossed from page one. I was impressed by how the lively characters jumped off the page. Creepy and fascinatingly un-put-downable..dont let the occasionally terrible punctuation grammar etc put you off!
by Rhydderch Wilson
Whitechapel 1988 was no place for a lady. Not only were poverty, disease, crime and alcoholism rife, but there was a notorious killer on the loose whose savagery, it seemed, knew no limits. But Jack the Ripper wasn’t the only murderer preying on woman at that time.
The Ladies of Whitechapel by Denise Bloom sits as a worthy companion piece to Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five: the Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper. But whereas that was a work of social history, Bloom’s book is a novelised account of four gruesome deaths that occurred around the Ripper murders, in the same borough and in the same year.
This novel, which is presented as four self-contained stories, albeit it with overlapping themes, locations and characters, tells the tale of a high society woman who abandons her life of privilege for true love, a bereaved woman abandoned by uncaring relatives, a music hall entertainer raped by a lord. But it was the account, told in the first person, of one woman’s descent into destitution that I found the most affecting, because of the immediacy of the narrative and the doomed resilience of the character in whose company we find ourselves.
The fog-shrouded alleyways and grimy taverns of late Victorian London are vividly evoked, and the squalor in which these women are forced to eke their lives out is palpable. Every day they are stalked by multiple spectres, not all of whom carry knives. There is alcoholism, domestic violence and men rich enough to not have to worry about small things like consequences. And just as it was with Rubenhold’s book, you finish The Ladies of Whitechapel with the dark impression that none of the women who lived there in 1888 stood a chance.
by Nanny Kate
Obviously researched well, but the use of research woven into fiction doesn’t quite run together. Didn’t pay much to read it, which is a good thing
by Ummay G
Could not put this book down I was very unhappy when I came to the end. Would recommend this book.I
by EmilyB
I really enjoyed this. A history lover and Ripperologist myself, this was a fantastic insight into Victorian Whitechapel and into the everyday lives of its women.
The theories and research on the possible Ripper/s was also a very interesting take, and I thorough enjoyed it.
*Some punctuation and spelling mistakes were the only reason I marked it 4 instead of 5, as it is really distracting when in full reading flow to have to try and work out where the sentence joins the next.
by EAND
This is the gruesome imagining of the deaths of four women in London in 1888 at the same time the Ripper was at large. This is bleak at times and any period of fortune is swiftly crushed. The brutality of the treatment of women and the telling of the murders is hard to read but Bloom writes with such descriptive prose – I can see the sweet shop, the barrows of cockles and mussels and smell the carbolic soap. The image of laying violets and daisies on a grave was very moving. Bloom’s theory is a fascinating one and I like how the threads run through each story – some characters coming full circle. No one has a ‘magic shilling tree’ and no wonder people took to the gin bottle, but despite the sadness of the story this is an absorbing read.
by Amazon Customer
Beautiful writing: love the simple English, no complexities. Easy read.
Hope to read all her books. Thank you xxx xx