Play Book Tag discussion

The Dictionary of Lost Words – Pip Williams
Digital audiobook narrated by Pippa Bennett-Warner
3.5***

”Some words are more important than others – I learned this, growing up in the Scriptorium. But it took me a long time to understand why.”

Esme is a young motherless child when her father takes her to work with him. He’s one of the lexicographers who are collecting information for the first Oxford English Dictionary. Sitting under the sorting table where the men work, Esme is surrounded by words and their meanings. One day she finds a slip of paper with the word bondmaid printed on it. After learning that it means “slave girl,” Esme begins to save the “forgotten” words that fall beneath the table. Eventually she realizes that the discarded slips are frequently words related to women or to common folk, and she begins to collect them in earnest with the goal of writing her own dictionary – a Dictionary of Lost Words.

Esme is a wonderful character, maturing from an innocent child to curious adolescent to determined young woman. And living at a time when the Women’s Suffrage Movement was very active in England, and World War I was looming. She is nurtured by her father, but also by a few women, beginning with Lizzie, a maid whom Esme trusts to keep the slips of paper safely hidden away. Another is Ditte, Esme’s godmother, a “learned lady” and a regular contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary project. (Edith Thompson, a/k/a Ditte, was a real woman who, along with her sister, contributed tens of thousands of entries to the OED.)

I like the way that Williams puts the focus on the “missing women” in history. She’s far from strident, but she is insistent and caused this reader to think about all the missing women is “HIS”tory.

Pippa Bennet-Warner does a fine job of narrating the audiobook. I really liked how she interpreted these characters. She sets a good pace and has very clear diction, so even when I doubled the speed, I could easily understand her.


LINK to my review

I really quite liked this one, and I've added another book by this author to my TBR.

I liked this a lot too and I have her new one lined up