Jack the Ripper, the serial killer who terrorized London’s East End in the late 19th century, may be the catalyst for historian Hallie Rubenhold’s fascinating new book, but he is in no way its subject. Readers who wish to linger over the bloody details of the murders or speculate as to the killer’s still-unknown identity will have to look elsewhere, in the rich seam of Ripper lore. This is a story of life, not death.

As the United States gets closer to marking the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote, we can expect a rising tide of books analyzing the victory and its legacy.

World War I fundamentally reshaped America’s sense of itself and its relation to the world; it also helped form our modern understanding of citizenship, democracy and the role of the state. But in the American popular imagination, the war is a blank, a situation without a story.

The first militant act of the Women’s Social and Political Union was a dry-mouthed spit, “a kind of pout,” from 25-year-old Christabel Pankhurst into the face of a police officer, the only physical assault she could manage while her arms and legs were restrained. Her action, carried out in Manchester in 1905, got her labeled a “spitfire,” which pleased her, and arrested, which pleased her even more.

They were single and married, mothers and not, educated and self-taught, financially comfortable and struggling. Their work spans the second half of the 20th century and continues into the present. They did not know one another. But in her lively new biography of Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Jane Goodall and Alice Waters, Andrea Barnet makes a compelling case that these women “changed our world.”

The simple definition of work—tasks performed for a wage under legally binding conditions, on a regular schedule—is in fact a rare and recent formula.

Throughout her life, where Wallis lived and traveled, what she did and who with, was dictated entirely by her man, or men, of the moment. No wonder she was furious most of the time.

Early in the morning, after finishing Vybarr Cregan-Reid’s hard-to-cat­egorize “Footnotes,” I am penned in a corral with more than 5,000 other runners in New York’s Central Park, as the sun heats up, music pumps and officials congratulate us through loudspeakers for supporting the charity of the day.

In A. Scott Berg’s book, and in the new film, the worn-out trope of the male literary genius gets one more day in the sun.

As a child, Blanche Wolf wanted more than anything to live a life surrounded by books. When she met Alfred Knopf in 1911, she was attracted most of all to his bookishness. Her dream life was simple, heartbreakingly so: “We decided we would get married and make books and publish them.” How could she have known that the hardest part of that dream was the “we”?

Imagine the plot of a romantic comedy: An English writer who has given up on love meets a man who asks her to move halfway across the world for him. That’s the prologue to “The Lonely City,” and you might expect (or dread) the ensuing story of a woman learning to love her single state, until she’s saved by a new relationship. Thankfully, Olivia Laing’s unusual book — part memoir, part biography, part cultural criticism — is less a predictable rom-com than a wonderfully melancholy meditation on modern art, urban space and the complexity of being alone.

The goshawk is not an easy bird to tame, to take under one’s wing.

It would be two years and two more serious romances on her part before Hepburn publicly partnered with Hughes, shortly before she was infamously blasted as “box office poison.” The gossip columns latched onto the story of “the damsel in distress rescued by a dashing aviator,” but they were more alike, and more equal, than that.

When socially privileged children are separated from their families at a tender age, some develop what psychotherapists have called “Boarding School Syndrome”: “a defensive and protective encapsulation of the self,” in which they learn to hide emotion, fake maturity, and assert dominance over anyone weaker. They develop loyalty to their institutional tribe and suspicion of outsiders; they become bullies devoted to winning above all.

In “Dead Girls,” her sharp-eyed book of essays about literature, pop culture and the fantasies they weave for and about young women, Alice Bolin is never more precise than when putting her finger on her self-doubt.

Princess Margaret, Queen Elizabeth II’s beautiful, reckless, perennially heartbroken younger sister, is everywhere and nowhere in British history in the second half of the 20th century. Running his finger down the index of books by artists, writers and comedians, her irreverent biographer Craig Brown spots her “sandwiched for eternity” between the illustrious — Marie Antoinette — and the pedestrian — the scruffy English seaside town of Margate, where she has a namesake avenue.

On its surface, Glynnis MacNicol’s memoir seems simple, even mundane: a straight, single woman turns 40 and faces the challenge of defining herself and her life in the absence of marriage and children.

“Anyone who writes an autobiography is either a twat or broke,” Viv Albertine, guitarist for the all-female punk band The Slits, wrote in the introduction to her first book Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys.: A Memoir, which came out in 2014. “I’m a bit of both.”

Geoff Dyer's grandfather fought at the battle of the Somme, the 4½-month campaign that began in the summer of 1916 and saw nearly 100,000 soldiers of the British Empire perish for gains of about six miles. Family lore holds that he had been turned away at the recruiting office and told to "come back in a couple of days when he was two years older."