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Summary
Summary
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK * "Delightful . . . [a] captivating and slyly subversive fictional paean to the real women whose work on the Oxford English Dictionary went largely unheralded."-- The New York Times Book Review
"A marvelous fiction about the power of language to elevate or repress."--Geraldine Brooks, New York Times bestselling author of People of the Book
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.
WINNER OF THE AUSTRALIAN BOOK INDUSTRY AWARD
Author Notes
Pip Williams was born in London, grew up in Sydney, and now lives in the Adelaide Hills of South Australia with her family and an assortment of animals. She has spent most of her working life as a social researcher, studying what keeps us well and what helps us thrive, and she is the author of One Italian Summer , a memoir of her family's travels in search of the good life, which was published in Australia to wide acclaim. Based on her original research in the Oxford English Dictionary archives, The Dictionary of Lost Words is her first novel.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Williams's exuberant, meticulously researched debut, the daughter of a lexicographer devotes her life to an alternative dictionary. As a young child in 1880s Oxford, Esme Nicoll is enchanted by the "Scriptorium," a shed behind their house where her father, Harry, works with a team to sort and select words for the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. When she finds the word "bondmaid" on a discarded slip and realizes the term refers to a female slave, Esme begins her own effort, the "Dictionary of Lost Words," stowing slips of words deemed unfit for the OED in a chest belonging to their servant, Lizzie. In her teens, Esme becomes further obsessed with which words make the cut--decisions primarily made by men--and listens to women in the marketplace, returning with suggestions for Harry. The ensuing bildungsroman carries the reader at a rapid pace through Esme's 20s, when she rubs shoulders with suffragettes, finds romance, and bonds with Lizzie while struggling to get her book of lost words printed. Though this sweeping effort takes some time to build momentum, the payoff is deeply satisfying. Williams's feminist take on language will move readers. Agent: Linda Kaplan, DeFiore and Co. (Apr.)
Guardian Review
In 1901, a concerned member of the public wrote to the men compiling the first Oxford English Dictionary to let them know that there was a word missing. In 1857 the Unregistered Words Committee of the Philological Society of London had decided that Britain needed a successor to Samuel Johnson's 1755 dictionary. It had taken 40 years for the first volume - the letters A and B - to be published, and now they had only gone and left out a word. The word was "bondmaid", and when Australian author Pip Williams learned of its exclusion, she knew she had the makings of a novel. The Dictionary of Lost Words tells the story of the OED's compilation through the fictional Esme, daughter of one of the men working on it, and her interactions with characters based on the real men and women behind the book. A bondmaid is a young woman bound to serve until her death. As Williams explains in her author's note, uses of the word had been supplied by members of the public - an important part of how the dictionary was compiled - but the piece of paper showing the final definition is still missing from the archives today. In the novel, this is Esme's doing: when the word falls off a table in the Scriptorium or "scrippy" - the Oxford garden shed in which the dictionary is compiled - she pockets it. Then she starts collecting more words that the editors exclude or lose. Eventually, she includes these and others heard on the streets (knackered, latchkeyed, cunt, fuck and dollymop) in her own manuscript, Women's Words and their Meanings. Williams writes that her novel "began as two simple questions. Do words mean different things to men and women? And if they do, is it possible that we have lost something in the process of defining them?" From the local suffragettes Esme learns that "sisters" can mean comrades. She puzzles over the definition of "mother" and whether it excludes a woman who has a stillbirth, or who gives her daughter up for adoption, or whose son dies in the first world war. Some readers may be deterred by Esme's virtuousness and smooth edges. To others, this gentle, hopeful story will be a balm for nerves frazzled by the pandemic or patience fried by sexism. "Everything I do gets eaten or dirtied or burned," Lizzie, the housemaid working for very little money for the dictionary's first editor, tells Esme. "At the end of the day there's no proof I've been here at all." It is Lizzie who assures Esme of the relevance of "bondmaid" and provides its definition.
Kirkus Review
The Herculean efforts required to assemble the Oxford English Dictionary are retold, this time from a fictionalized, distaff point of view, in Williams' debut novel. Esme Nicoll, the motherless young daughter of a lexicographer working in the Scriptorium--in reality, a garden shed in Oxford where a team led by James Murray, one of the OED's editors, toiled--accompanies her father to work frequently. The rigor and passion with which the project is managed is apparent to the sensitive and curious Esme, as is the fact that the editorial team of men labors under the influence of Victorian-era mores. Esme begins a clandestine operation to rescue words which have been overlooked or intentionally omitted from the epic dictionary. Her childhood undertaking becomes a lifelong endeavor, and her efforts to validate the words which flew under the (not yet invented) radar of the OED gatekeepers gain traction at the same time the women's suffrage movement fructifies in England. The looming specter of World War I lends tension to Esme's personal saga while a disparate cast of secondary characters adds pathos and depth. Underlying this panoramic account are lexicographical and philosophical interrogatives: Who owns language, does language reflect or affect, who chooses what is appropriate, why is one meaning worthier than another, what happens when a word mutates in meaning? (For example, the talismanic word first salvaged by Esme, bondmaid, pops up with capricious irregularity and amorphous meaning throughout the lengthy narrative.) Williams provides readers with detailed background and biographical information pointing to extensive research about the OED and its editors, many of whom appear as characters in Esme's life. The result is a satisfying amalgam of truth and historical fiction. Who tells your story? Williams illuminates why women needed to be in the room where, and when, it's written. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Do words mean different things to men and women? That is the question at the heart of Williams' thoughtful and gentle first novel based on original research in the Oxford English Dictionary archives and set during the women's suffrage movement in England. Motherless Esme spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, the garden shed in the back of the house where her father works for the Scots-born lexicographer James Murray and his monk-like team, who are collecting words for the first edition of the OED. "Instead of storing shovels and rakes, the shed stored words." Some slips of paper carrying words are misplaced or discarded, and it is these "lost" words that Esme is determined to rescue from certain oblivion. The words that resonate with her range from the profane to the political. As Esme confronts sexism in her daily life, she finds solace in the meaning and significance of "women's words," which address the female experience. A lexicographer's dream of a novel, this is a lovely book to get lost in, an imaginative love letter to dictionaries.
Excerpts
Excerpts
May 1887 Scriptorium. It sounds as if it might have been a grand building, where the lightest footstep would echo between marble floor and gilded dome. But it was just a shed, in the back garden of a house in Oxford. Instead of storing shovels and rakes, the shed stored words. Every word in the English language was written on a slip of paper the size of a postcard. Volunteers posted them from all over the world, and they were kept in bundles in the hundreds of pigeon-holes that lined the shed walls. Dr. Murray was the one who named it the Scriptorium--he must have thought it an indignity for the English language to be stored in a garden shed--but everyone who worked there called it the Scrippy. Everyone but me. I liked the feel of Scriptorium as it moved around my mouth and landed softly between my lips. It took me a long time to learn to say it, and when I finally did nothing else would do. Da once helped me search the pigeon-holes for scriptorium. We found five slips with examples of how the word had been used, each quotation dating back little more than a hundred years. All of them were more or less the same, and none of them referred to a shed in the back garden of a house in Oxford. A scriptorium, the slips told me, was a writing room in a monastery. But I understood why Dr. Murray had chosen it. He and his assistants were a little like monks, and when I was five it was easy to imagine the Dictionary as their holy book. When Dr. Murray told me it would take a lifetime to compile all the words, I wondered whose. His hair was already as grey as ash, and they were only halfway through B. Da and Dr. Murray had been teachers together in Scotland long before there was a scriptorium. And because they were friends, and because I had no mother to care for me, and because Da was one of Dr. Murray's most trusted lexicographers, everyone turned a blind eye when I was in the Scriptorium. The Scriptorium felt magical, like everything that ever was and ever could be had been stored within its walls. Books were piled on every surface. Old dictionaries, histories and tales from long ago filled the shelves that separated one desk from another, or created a nook for a chair. Pigeon-holes rose from the floor to the ceiling. They were crammed full of slips, and Da once said that if I read every one, I'd understand the meaning of everything. In the middle of it all was the sorting table. Da sat at one end, and three assistants could fit along either side. At the other end was Dr. Murray's high desk, facing all the words and all the men who helped him define them. We always arrived before the other lexicographers, and for that little while I would have Da and the words all to myself. I'd sit on Da's lap at the sorting table and help him sort the slips. Whenever we came across a word I didn't know, he would read the quotation it came with and help me work out what it meant. If I asked the right questions, he would try to find the book the quotation came from and read me more. It was like a treasure hunt, and sometimes I found gold. "This boy had been a scatter-brained scapegrace from his birth." Da read the quotation from a slip he had just pulled out of an envelope. "Am I a scatter-brained scapegrace?" I asked. "Sometimes," Da said, tickling me. Then I asked who the boy was, and Da showed me where it was written at the top of the slip. "Ala-ed-Din and the Wonderful Lamp," he read. When the other assistants arrived I slipped under the sorting table. "Be quiet as a mouse and stay out of the way," Da said. It was easy to stay hidden. At the end of the day I sat on Da's lap by the warmth of the grate and we read "Ala-ed-Din and the Wonderful Lamp." It was an old story, Da said. About a boy from China. When I asked if there were others, he said there were a thousand more. The story was like nothing I had heard, nowhere I had been, and no one I knew of. I looked around the Scriptorium and imagined it as a genie's lamp. It was so ordinary on the outside, but on the inside full of wonder. And some things weren't always what they seemed. The next day, after helping with the slips, I pestered Da for another story. In my enthusiasm I forgot to be as quiet as a mouse; I was getting in his way. "A scapegrace will not be allowed to stay," Da warned, and I imagined being banished to Ala-ed-Din's cave. I spent the rest of the day beneath the sorting table, where a little bit of treasure found me. It was a word, and it slipped off the end of the table. When it lands, I thought, I'll rescue it, and hand it to Dr. Murray myself. I watched it. For a thousand moments I watched it ride some unseen current of air. I expected it to land on the unswept floor, but it didn't. It glided like a bird, almost landing, then rose up to somersault as if bidden by a genie. I never imagined that it might land in my lap, that it could possibly travel so far. But it did. The word sat in the folds of my dress like a bright thing fallen from heaven. I dared not touch it. It was only with Da that I was allowed to hold the words. I thought to call out to him, but something caught my tongue. I sat with the word for a long time, wanting to touch it, but not. What word? I wondered. Whose? No one bent down to claim it. After a long while I scooped the word up, careful not to crush its silvery wings, and brought it close to my face. It was difficult to read in the gloom of my hiding spot. I shuffled along to where a curtain of sparkling dust hung between two chairs. I held the word up to the light. Black ink on white paper. Eight letters; the first, a butterfly B. I moved my mouth around the rest as Da had taught me: O for orange, N for naughty, D for dog, M for Murray, A for apple, I for ink, D for dog, again. I sounded them out in a whisper. The first part was easy: bond. The second part took a little longer, but then I remembered how the A and I went together. Maid. The word was bondmaid. Below it were other words that ran together like a tangle of thread. I couldn't tell if they made up a quotation sent in by a volunteer or a definition written by one of Dr. Murray's assistants. Da said that all the hours he spent in the Scriptorium were to make sense of the words sent in by volunteers, so that those words could be defined in the Dictionary. It was important, and it meant I would get a schooling and three hot meals and grow up to be a fine young lady. The words, he said, were for me. "Will they all get defined?" I once asked. "Some will be left out," Da said. "Why?" He paused. "They're just not solid enough." I frowned, and he said, "Not enough people have written them down." "What happens to the words that are left out?" "They go back in the pigeon-holes. If there isn't enough information about them, they're discarded." "But they might be forgotten if they're not in the Dictionary." He'd tilted his head to one side and looked at me, as if I'd said something important. "Yes, they might." I knew what happened when a word was discarded. I folded bondmaid carefully and put it in the pocket of my pinny. A moment later, Da's face appeared under the sorting table. "Run along now, Esme. Lizzie's waiting for you." I peered between all the legs--chairs', table's, men's--and saw the Murrays' young maid standing beyond the open door, her pinafore tied tight around her waist, too much fabric above and too much fabric below. She was still growing into it, she told me, but from under the sorting table she reminded me of someone playing at dress up. I crawled between the pairs of legs and scampered out to her. "Next time you should come in and find me; it would be more fun," I said, when I got to Lizzie. "It's not me place." She took my hand and walked me to the shade of the ash tree. "Where is your place?" She frowned, then shrugged. "The room at the top of the stairs, I s'pose. The kitchen when I'm helping Mrs. Ballard, but definitely not when I ain't. St. Mary Magdalen on a Sunday." "Is that all?" "The garden, when I'm caring for you--so we don't get under Mrs. B's feet. And more and more the Covered Market, 'cos of her cranky knees." "Has Sunnyside always been your place?" I asked. "Not always." She looked down at me, and I wondered where her smile had gone. "Where did it used to be?" She hesitated. "With me ma and all our littluns." "What are littluns?" "Children." "Like me?" "Like you, Essymay." "Are they dead?" "Just me ma. The littluns was taken away, I don't know where. They was too young for service." Excerpted from The Dictionary of Lost Words: A Novel by Pip Williams All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
