Hallie Rubenhold is a Britishhistorian and author. Her work specializes in 18th and 19th century social history and women's history. Her 2019 book, , about the lives of the women murdered by Jack the Ripper was awarded the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-fiction.
In 2005, she wrote an accessible history of Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies and its author in her book The Covent Garden Ladies: Pimp General Jack and the Extraordinary Story of Harris' List, and in 2008 published The Harlot's Handbook: Harris's List, a selection of the directories' "funniest, rudest and most surreal entries". The BBC later adapted the material for a documentary, presented by Rubenhold herself called The Harlots Handbook. Rubenhold's work also served as the inspiration for the Channel 4 drama series City of Vice and for the Hulu drama series Harlots. Rubenhold appears regularly as an expert contributor on history documentaries for British and US networks. In the past she has appeared on BBC 2's Balderdash and Piffle, discussing the origins of merkins with burlesque star Immodesty Blaize and on BBC 4's Age of Excess. She has contributed to the BBC series The Beauty of Maps and to History Cold Case and to Channel 4's Titanic: The Mission, as well as the Travel Channel's Mysteries at the Museum and Private Lives of the Monarchs. She also works as a historical consultant for period dramas, including Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and Harlots. Her book, Lady Worsley's Whim, published in November 2008, is an account of one of the eighteenth century's most sensational sex scandals, the criminal conversation case of Sir Richard Worsley against Maurice George Bisset for having committed adultery with Seymour Dorothy Fleming, a member of The New Female Coterie established by Caroline Stanhope, Countess of Harrington. It featured as BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week from 3 November 2008 and was adapted into a 90-minute drama for BBC 2 entitled The Scandalous Lady W, broadcast on 17 August 2015, and starring Natalie Dormer. Rubenhold has written two novels, both set during the eighteenth century. The French Lesson is set during the Terror in Revolutionary Paris. It follows on from her first novel, Mistress of My Fate, the first book in the Confessions of Henrietta Lightfoot series. Both books are written as an hommage to classic works of eighteenth and early nineteenth century literature. Her most recent book is The Five, a biography of the five victims of Jack the Ripper. It won the £50,000 Baillie Gifford Prize in 2019 and was named the Hay Festival Book of the Year. It was also shortlisted for the 2020 Wolfson History Prize. Rubenhold is married and lives in London.
