The Dictionary Of Lost Words by Pip Williams
In 1901, the word ‘Bondmaid’ was discovered missing from the Oxford English Dictionary. This is the story of the girl who stole it.
Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the ‘Scriptorium’, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word ‘bondmaid’ flutters to the floor. Esme rescues the slip and stashes it in an old wooden case that belongs to her friend, Lizzie, a young servant in the big house. Esme begins to collect other words from the Scriptorium that are misplaced, discarded or have been neglected by the dictionary men. They help her make sense of the world.
Over time, Esme realises that some words are considered more important than others, and that words and meanings relating to women’s experiences often go unrecorded. While she dedicates her life to the Oxford English Dictionary, secretly, she begins to collect words for another dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words.
Set when the women’s suffrage movement was at its height and the Great War loomed, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. It’s a delightful, lyrical and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words, and the power of language to shape the world and our experience of it.
My Review
Absolutely fantastic! Who knew that a book about compiling a dictionary could be so emotional and beautiful.
It’s a combination of fictitious characters like Esme and her father ‘Da’, and others like Dr Murray, his daughters Elsie and Rosfrith and Ditte who really existed. The author gives some of the real people more importance and personality in the story than we know as real – Ditte for instance is very central to the book, but in reality we know little about her in real life.
Esme has spent much of her childhood in the Scriptorium where ‘her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard.‘
Then one day she finds the word ‘bondmaid’, which she ‘steals’ and hides in an old trunk under her friend Lizzie’s bed. But Lizzie is actually a servant in the big house – a ‘bondmaid’. This one word changes Esme’s life.
So while Esme continues to work on the Oxford English Dictionary, she begins to collect rejected words – those not written down, not supported by the men at the Scriptorium or considered too offensive in polite society to be included. It will be called: The Dictionary of Lost Words.
While the lexicographers live in their bubble of words, around them the country is preparing for war – a war that will see so many from the nearby printing press sent to the front, never to return. It also sees Esme become tangled in a relationship with an actress who is part of the suffragette movement, one which Esme supports, but doesn’t want to be part of the violent protests.
I cannot express how much I adored this book. There are not enough words in The Oxford English Dictionary and The Dictionary Of Lost Words combined to give it justice. It is probably one of my favourite books of the year. It is so much more than a story about words, love, women’s suffrage and war – it’s a masterpiece of storytelling.
About the Author
Pip was born in London, grew up in Sydney and now calls the Adelaide Hills home. She is co-author of the book Time Bomb: Work Rest and Play in Australia Today (New South Press, 2012) and in 2017 she wrote One Italian Summer, a memoir of her family’s travels in search of the good life, which was published with Affirm Press to wide acclaim. Pip has also published travel articles, book reviews, flash fiction and poetry.
