In the late spring of 2019, I suffered an accident that put me in a deep coma for days. The details of the event are yet to be clearly explained, since I developed a retrograde amnesia, which doesn’t let me remember the previous moments and thus fully recall it. However, the raw facts go like this: I woke up in the middle of the night, in the seaside house where I had travelled for the weekend, went outside and fell out of a nearby three storey balcony on the asphalt in the street. When I came out of the coma, I was diagnosed with a gash in the carotid artery on the right side of my neck.
It immediately came to my mind that what provoked Mary Jane Kelly’s death, the last victim of the so-called Whitechapel murders in 1888 committed by Jack the Ripper (a sobriquet never mentioned across this book) was precisely the same injury as a result of aggression, although many barbaric ones had been perpetrated on her. Of all the canonical Ripper murders, Mary Jane Kelly’s is considered the most gruesome, and also puzzling, of them all. During the long weeks I passed in bed following my accident, Mary Jane Kelly invaded my thoughts and gave me company, offering me talks on herself, always in the form of poems and verses. That’s the genesis of this book.