The Dictionary of Lost Words
Book: The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams
Synopsis:
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.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐.5/5
My Thoughts: This book pleasantly surprised me after I spent the first quarter of it thinking it wasn’t going to live up to expectations. The slow start didn’t grab me, and it took a little while to see the true meaning behind the words Esme was collecting in her trunk, but once I made it to Esme’s teen and adult years I found myself comfortable in the hands of the story.
While I understand the need for much of the exposition, part of me wishes we could’ve spent more of the novel with not only adult Esme but also adult Elsie and Rosfrith. Much of the heart Esme’s dictionary was documenting the world of unheard women but it felt like we didn’t really get to know the ones who spent their lives right next to her. We never found out how Elsie and Rosfrith felt about their own lives growing up in the scriptorium. They all grew into working women but the book tended to frame Elsie and Rosfrith’s path as the easy one based on their upbringing instead of conscious choices to buck the trends of their era.
Obviously, the treatment of a couple of side characters shouldn’t derail the book as a whole and it certainly didn’t here. This is a compelling feminist story and one of those good fiction books that makes you feel like a smarter, more well-read person once you finish it. You’ll get a taste of the history of the Oxford English Dictionary, suffrage in the UK, and life in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly women’s lives. This book has an almost innately magical feel, like it could easily be translated into the fantasy genre, while still being fully grounded in realism.
You can get your own copy of The Dictionary of Lost Words here or borrow it from your local library.
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