The Dictionary of Lost Words - Pip Williams

 

Description

Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, Esme spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of lexicographers are gathering words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary.

Esme's place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day, she sees a slip containing the word bondmaid flutter to the floor, unclaimed. Esme seizes the word and hides it in an old wooden trunk 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 related to women's experiences often go unrecorded. 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 our experience of the world.

Review

This book was ok, but I didn't love it.

I love words and their history so the title of this book really appealed to me. Based on the true story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary with a fictional character called Esme (and a few others) woven through the story. The research that must have gone into the book is very evident in the writing.

Reading about the Scriptorium and the sourcing of words and their contributors was great. However, it went on for far too long and in such detail that I began to get bored. A third of the way through and I felt like this was a story that was becoming very long winded. The story picked up a little after this and included references to the Suffrage movement which I found really interesting.

Unfortunately it wasn't long before the book once again became very drawn out in the telling of the tale. By the end of the book I had no compassion for Esme, she seemed to be a very one dimensional character. I think I enjoyed the premise of the Dictionary of Lost Words and the last pages of the book the most, together with the author's notes. This was a great story, just for me too long in the telling.

I'm giving this book 3 out of 5 stars. My thanks to netgalley for the ARC to review.