Hallie is available to offer expert historical advice on period dramas, documentaries, interactive games and other projects requiring insight into the past. She is happy to provide advice on;

•     Historical research, source material, resources
•     Developing historically accurate story lines
•     Character research and development
•     Period clothing, interiors, props
•     Dialogue and deportment
•     Script read-through and evaluation – will offer detailed commentary and suggestions on factual and dramatic scripts

Contact: Camilla Young

Published on 25 March (US) and 27 March 2025 (UK) comes the much anticipated follow up to The Five. Story of a Murder is an epic examination of the historical true-crime story of infamous wife-murderer Dr Crippen in Edwardian England, brought to justice by an extraordinary group of women.

On 1 February, 1910, vivacious music hall performer, Belle Elmore, suddenly vanished from her north London home, causing alarm among her circle of female friends, the entertainers of the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild who demanded an immediate investigation.

They could not have known what they would provoke: the unearthing of a gruesome secret, followed by a fevered manhunt for the prime suspect: Belle’s husband, medical fraudster, Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen.

Hiding in the shadows of this tale is Crippen’s typist and lover, Ethel Le Neve – was she really just ‘an innocent young girl’ in thrall to a powerful older man as so many people have since reported?

In this panoramic look at one of the most infamous murders of the twentieth century, prizewinning social historian Hallie Rubenhold gives voice to those who have never properly been heard – the women.

Featuring a carnival cast of eccentric entertainers, glamorous lawyers, zealous detectives, medics and liars, Story of a Murder is meticulously researched and multi-layered, offering the reader an electrifying snapshot of Britain and America at the dawn of the modern era.

Read the Interview in The Bookseller

Hallie worked with the writers, director and producers to help recreate Victorian London as seen in Disney +’s A Thousand Blows.

Radio Times
History Extra
BBC

Seasons 1 – 3 of Harlots was inspired by Hallie’s book, The Covent Garden Ladies . She has acted as historical consultant to the series, advising on scripts, props and costume.

Read more about Harlots and The Harris’ List of Covent Garden Ladies:

In The Sun, The Guardian, Vanity Fair

The Covent Garden Ladies can be purchased here.

Hallie’s edited version of The Harris’s List can be purchased here.

The Five was the 2019 winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-fiction and was shortlisted for the 2020 Wolfson History Prize. It is the first full-length biography to explore and contextualize the lives of the five victims of Jack the Ripper. Offering new insights and drawing on previously unseen or unpublished material, its focus is entirely on the women and not on their murderer.

The story of Jack the Ripper has captivated our attention for over 130 years. Daily, tourists from around the globe make pilgrimages to visit the places where the ‘canonical five’ women; Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Kate Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly were murdered while never knowing more than just the most basic ‘facts’ about their lives.  Ask anyone unfamiliar with the details of the case what they know about Jack the Ripper and the response will almost certainly be ‘he killed prostitutes’.

But what if virtually everything we’d ever come to assume about these five women was largely untrue? What if our general lack of understanding of how poor, working class women lived or how ‘respectable society’ viewed them has led us to believe that all of these women were ‘just prostitutes’, and that somehow this label has made their lives less worthy of exploration or commemoration? What if we learned that none of them were born in Whitechapel, or even in the East End, but ended up there after living full lives elsewhere? What if we learned that these women had been either wives or mothers or both? What would we think of ourselves and our society for never having questioned these things?

The Five has completely changed the narrative of the Ripper murders. As an investigation into these women’s experiences, it traces the surprising triumphs and heart-breaking difficulties they encountered throughout their lives. In hearing their stories it will be impossible for us to ever again see them as something other than daughters, wives, sisters, lovers and mothers or to remember them simply as nameless, faceless victims.

The Five is available in bookshops and online in the UK, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other English language territories.Foreign language editions available in Italian, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Croatian, Czech, Polish, Swedish, Dutch, Finnish, Ukrainian, Russian, Turkish, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Arabic and complex and simplified Chinese. An English language audio version is available.

The Five was also shortlisted for the 2019 CWA Gold Dagger, the HWA Crown for Nonfiction, and Agatha Award for non-fiction, and a 2020 Anthony Award for non-fiction.

Interviews with Hallie about writing The Five:

The Five has been long listed for the 2019 Baillie Gifford Prize, and short-listed for both the Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger for Non-fiction and the Historical Writers Association Sharpe Books Non-fiction Crown.

What the critics say about The Five:

Mail on Sunday : “FIVE STARS: At last, the Ripper’s victims get a voice… An eloquent, stirring challenge to reject the prevailing Ripper myth.” (Gwen Smith )

The Guardian: “Forests have been felled in the interests of unmasking the murderer, but until now no one has bothered to discover the identity of his victims. The Five is thus an angry and important work of historical detection, calling time on the misogyny that has fed the Ripper myth. . . This is a powerful and a shaming book, but most shameful of all is that it took 130 years to write.” (Frances Wilson)

Daily Mail : “By collating these five deeply affecting biographies … Rubenhold has given these women the immortality that their murderer does not deserve.”

Sunday Times : ‘‘Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly deserve to be thought of as more than eviscerated bodies on an East London street. This haunting book does something to redress that balance.” (Daisy Goodwin)

The Spectator: “… a magnificently vivid book that shows how — despite the degradations inflicted by violent men, inept police and a bloodthirsty public — dead women can be given back their voices. ”

The Washington Post : “Rubenhold aims to restore them to history as full human beings…Her riveting work, both compassionate group portait and stinging social history, finally gives them their due”.

“How fitting that in the year when we celebrate the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, dignity is finally returned to these unfortunate women.” (Professor Dame Sue Black, author of ALL THAT REMAINS)

“A Ripper narrative that gives voice to the women he silenced; I’ve been waiting for this book for years. Beautifully written and with the grip of a thriller, it will open your eyes and break your heart.” (Erin Kelly, author of HE SAID/SHE SAID)

“What a brilliant and necessary book” (Jo Baker, author of LONGBOURN)

“Devastatingly good. The Five will leave you in tears of pity and of rage.” (LUCY WORSLEY)

“Stupendous. The sort of work that keeps history vital.” (IMOGEN HERMES GOWAR, author of THE MERMAID AND MRS HANCOCK)

“Fascinating, compelling, moving, The Five makes a fierce, passionate argument about the ethics of how we engage with murder. A brilliant,properly thoughtful, responsible piece of political writing.” (BRIDGET COLLINS, author of THE BINDING

Contact: Vanessa Fogarty at Curtis Brown

History Cold Case

London: 2000

Private Lives of the Monarchs George III

The Harlot’s Handbook

The Harlot’s Handbook is a 30-minute documentary for the BBC based on her book, The Covent Garden Ladies presented by Hallie

Paris, 1792

Henrietta Lightfoot, a young Englishwoman fleeing from a dishonourable past in London, finds herself alone in a foreign city in the middle of the French Revolution. The great love of her life, Lord Allenham appears to have disappeared forever. To her assistance comes Grace Dalrymple Elliot, the celebrated Scottish mistress to the most influential men in France. But Mrs Elliott’s assistance comes at a price, and Henrietta soon finds herself a pawn in a vicious rivalry of powerful women.

Determined to unravel the mystery of her lover’s disappearance, Henrietta must form a number of dangerous liaisons. But within the mirrored rooms of the Palais Royal, nothing is as it seems. As the ways of the aristocratic old order crumble, politics and passion lead Henrietta into a deadly game, where the life she is striving to save may not even be her own.

Praise for The French Lesson:

The Times: ‘A gleefully modern retelling of a juicy chapter in history’

Sunday Times: ‘Rubenhold unfolds a complicated plot with great dexterity’

Red Magazine: ‘Dark and delicious’

The Critics say:

‘Compelling, playful, exuberant, a grippingly imagined adventure of aristocrats and adventuresses in the age of the French Revolution, SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE, Author of The Romanovs

‘Henrietta Lightfoot’s exploits in Revolutionary France are irresistible. She’s a heroine you can’t put down’ LUCY WORSLEY

Available to order on Amazon or in bookshops.

Audiobook can be downloaded here.

What the Critics said about The Harlots Handbook:

This was a documentary that struck the right balance between the informative and the titillating, thoughtful yet watchable television, a valuable counterweight to the loftier philosophical programmes in BBC4’s Enlightenment season.

Victor Lewis Smith, The Evening Standard

This wickedly entertaining documentary presented by historian Hallie Rubenhold takes us behind Harris’s List to the doorways and garrets of Georgian London and shows us just how little has changed today.

Sarah Hughes, The Observer

Anybody who believes that the Georgian era was a time of gracious elegance and refinement will find their preconceptions challenged by this unapologetically prurient documentary. It has a lot of fun sending its presenter, the comely historian Hallie Rubenhold, walking down red-lit London streets in a trench coat. This is the kind of popular history sure of seducing an audience. (Chosen as the Sunday Times Pick of the Day for the 29th of June 2006, and the History Pick of the Week)

Victoria Segal, The Sunday Times

Watch The Harlots Handbook

In addition, the Scandalous Lady W was featured on the cover of the Radio Time for the week of the 10 – 17th of August 2015.

The book was also published in the USA as “The Lady in Red”.

The book is a tale of sex, scandal and divorce in 18th Century England.

She was a spirited young heiress. He was a handsome baronet with a promising career in government. Their marriage had the makings of a fairy tale but ended as one of the most scandalous and highly publicised divorces in history.

The Worsleys, as friends of Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire were part of London’s fashionable set and indulged in its extravagant and hedonistic lifestyle. However, unlike the Duchess, the Worsleys failed to keep their sexual affairs out of the public eye. Their menage a trois became headline news and had devastating consequences.

In February 1782, England opened its newspapers to read the details of Sir Richard Worsley v. Maurice George Bisset, a Criminal Conversation trial in which Sir Richard attempted to sue his wife’s lover for an astronomical sum in damages. In the course of the proceedings, the Worsleys’ scandalous sexual arrangements, voyeuristic tendencies and bed-hopping antics were laid bare.

The trial and its verdict shocked society, but not as much as the unrepentant behaviour of Lady Worsley who, since her elopement with Captain Bisset, defied all social convention by flaunting her sexual conquests and mercilessly baiting her husband in the press.

Lady Worsley’s Whim is an eighteenth century drama where society, the press and the newspapers play a role in what can be considered one of the first celebrity divorce cases. More than a court room drama, it a thrilling tale of romance, revenge, and obsession which follows the lives of Sir Richard and Lady Worsley as they survive financial ruin, foreign adventure and revolution.

Their story has never before been told. For over two hundred years it lay buried in long-forgotten pamphlets, yellowing satires and uncatalogued letters. Impeccably researched and written with great flair, this lively and moving true history presents a rarely seen picture of aristocratic life in the Georgian era.

Lady Worsley’s Whim was Radio 4’s Book of the Week from November 3rd – 7th, 2008. It was Read by Rosamund Pike and produced by CSA Word.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00f6mv8

Reviews:

Lady Worsley’s Whim should come with a warning: nothing else in the genre is close to being this good. As a historian and a story teller, Hallie Rubenhold is in a league of her own. She keeps you glued to the very last page…
The Literary Review, November 2008

A fabulous 18th century tale of sex, scandal and divorce, and Hallie Rubenhold tells it beautifully.
The Telegraph, 11 November 2008

Rubenhold has an eye for an antique story…deliciously lurid
The Sunday Times, 9 November 2008

The story of the Worsley divorce has never been told before and Hallie Rubenhold tells it with panache. Her account of the elopement is gripping, but this is more than an 18th century bodice ripper. Rubenhold combines narrative skill with historical expertise, and she traces the knife-edge that women walked…with subtlety and assurance.
The Spectator, 19 November 2008

Lady Worsley’s Whim is told as a mystery, with Rubenhold keeping up the suspense and providing some surprises along the way. One of the strengths of this fine book is that it forces us to look not only at the unhappy couple but at the wider context…Hallie Rubenhold’s even-handed treatment is exemplary.
The Times Literary Supplement, 20 November 2008

Hallie Rubenhold’s captivating new cultural history gives an account of one of this century’s strangest marital scandals, the tale of the adulterous Lady Seymour Worsley and her vengeful husband, Sir Richard Worsley. . . Ms. Rubenhold’s book brings to life the dissipated and alluring world of aristocratic Georgian England, particularly its vexed sexual morality, through the story of a marriage and its unraveling . . . an impressive feat.

Washington Times