Hundredth book of 2020
Reading period: Nov 20th 2020 – Nov 24th 2020
Summary
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.
Rating
Review
This book breaks my heart, and at the same time, it was so heartwarming.
As you follow Esme, you discover a significant period of history with a lot of changes. The fact that you have different people from different societal layers helps to have a broad picture of what is happening in this era and how it’s perceived.
The protagonists are well done. Even if the main character is privileged, she is open-minded. The connections between the characters are a big part of the story as she discovers a lot through them. This makes them genuine even for fictional characters.
Also, I discover at the end that some of the characters were real.
The only thing is that I sometimes forget her purpose of keeping words or search them.
Little spoiler: I literary cry at the end.
Liz.
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