Author: Pip Williams
Year published: 2021
Category: Adult fiction
Pages: 400 pages
Rating: 5 out of 5
Location: (my 2025 Google Reading map): UK
Summary: Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, an Oxford garden shed in which her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word bondmaid flutters beneath the table. She rescues the slip and, learning that the word means “slave girl,” begins to collect other words that have been discarded or neglected by the dictionary men.
As she grows up, Esme realizes that words and meanings relating to women’s and common folks’ experiences often go unrecorded. And so she begins in earnest to search out words for her own dictionary: the Dictionary of Lost Words. To do so she must leave the sheltered world of the university and venture out to meet the people whose words will fill those pages.
Set during the height of the women’s suffrage movement and with the Great War looming, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. Inspired by actual events, author Pip Williams has delved into the archives of the Oxford English Dictionary to tell this highly original story. The Dictionary of Lost Words is a delightful, lyrical, and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words and the power of language to shape the world.
Review: I read the nonfiction book about creating the Oxford English Dictionary, Professor and the Madman, many years ago so when my in-person book group chose this fictionalized version of the same topic, I was excited. The OED had a prominent place in my upbringing, sitting in my father's study. I was fascinated by the magnifying glass that it came with so that we could read the tiny print within its two volumes. The irony that my vocabulary has always been lacking is not lost on me.
This novel is going to make my top of the year, I am sure! Esme is such an interesting character who from a young age loves words, the smell of paper, and being near the men who are working on the Dictionary. Her keeping of words that are discarded, those she finds, and those that she helps to disappear, is done in a loving way, as if she is keeping those words alive. And she does keep them alive.
And, yes, Esme misbehaves and makes mistakes, but she is finding her way in a man's academic world. She is learning about class, opportunities, paths we can take in life, and missed opportunities. Esme gives her all to the people and tasks in her life, caring about people and words equally.
If you are a frequent reader of this blog, you know I love a good Afterword, and this novel has one. The author writes about what is real (both characters and events, as well as the aura surrounding the OED). I am so glad that she included the history of the time--the suffragist/suffragette movements and World War I--and the ideas behind the very-male domainted work on the OED.
Challenges for which this counts:
- 20 Books of Summer
- Bookish--creating the OED
- Big Book--400 pages
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