Review: The Dictionary of Lost Words

 

Pip Williams, The Dictionary of Lost Words  2020

This fascinating book by the Australian novelist, Pip Williams, is a tour de force in the sense that she has managed to write an entire book about creating a dictionary without once becoming a pedantic bore.  It is a feminist tract without question. On the other hand, it is surrounded by a compelling and imaginative story of a woman who has become conscious in the late 19^th century that dictionaries have always been written by men and as a result many of the words used by or about women have been relegated to the dustbin or given negative meanings.

Esme, the heroine, has grown up in the Scriptorium, a drafty potting shed,  where a corps of scholars are assembling  The OED or (The Oxford Dictionary of the English Language.)  Initially, she is a child whose mother has died, crawling about beneath a sorting table and beginning to collect stray slips carrying words or definitions that have been discarded or carelessly dropped. As she matures, she becomes one of the few female employees working on the dictionary and a conscious collector of words dealing with women. Her maturation then encapsulates the thematic issues by integrating her story into the decline of the servant class and the rise of suffrage in England. 

Esme literally worship words-- their meanings, their derivations, and discussions of why certain words survive in print and others do not. She says: “Words are our tools of resurrections.”  It’s how you bring things back.   We won’t stop speaking them if they aren’t in the dictionary.”

The deep hurt and longing experienced by women of all classes is one of the stronger features of the book and it is nowhere communicated  so poignantly as when Esme’s life-long servant, Lizzie, says:  “I guess I like to keep my hands busy. . . . it proves I exist. . . .” I clean, I help with the cooking, I set the fires. Everything I do gets eaten or dirtied or burned—at the end of the day there’s no proof I’ve been here at all.”

Esme and Lizzie are afforded plenty of pragmatic experiences that highlight the task before them. Some of them are triumphant and some sad, but in total it makes one last quote from the book stand out to me. “We can’t always make the choices we’d like, but we can try to make the best of what we must settle for.”

Read this for its message, its inventive story, for the people it brings alive, or for your love of language, but do put it on your reading list.   

Jim De Young,  July, 2022