The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams

First a quick shout out for the most recent Maisie Dobbs mystery, The Consequences of Fear, by Jacqueline Winspear. I usually don’t review a series book (especially not book 16), and I just wrote about Winspear’s memoir, but I wanted to mention that this series continues to be very entertaining and intriguing.

As was The Dictionary of Lost Words, by Pip Williams. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I was thinking today that it’s a perfect example of fiction that deals with tragic events but manages to leave the reader hopeful. Actually, it left me deeply curious. I wished mightily that the main character, Esme Nicoll, was one of the real people Williams wove into her story. Unfortunately she’s entirely fictional but it’s a testament to debut novelist (and already accomplished scholar and writer) Williams that I believed she could be real, right up until I read the author’s note.

Williams was inspired by real stories about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary, and several of the characters Esme grows up knowing, and later working with, are actual people. I read a book about the making of the dictionary many years ago (by Simon Winchester, and so had Williams, and she noticed the lack of women. But she knew women were involved, notably editor James Murray’s daughters, and some of the volunteer contributors who sent in words or definitions. The OUP blog notes that Murray also hired a woman academic, which was uncommon at the time.

Esme is the daughter of one of Murray’s assistants, and as a small child she sits under the sorting table where the slips with words on them are organized. She develops a habit of taking slips from the floor. As she grows up she begins gathering words of her own, because she realizes that many of the words her friend, the Murray’s maid Lizzie, uses are never going to be in the dictionary because there aren’t published quotes to support them. She tells Lizzie that women sometimes use words differently, and those meanings are not reflected in the dictionary. Esme gathers those, too, writing up and stashing slips in a trunk under Lizzie’s bed.

Esme is a wonderful character, whose human imperfections make her very believable. Williams weaves in the story of Edith Thompson, real life OED contributor, sub-editor, and proofreader, by making her Esme’s aunt, a fascinating woman who has a big influence on Esme’s life. And she works in some astute observations about gender roles and class differences, as well as two key historical events that impact Esme and the other characters, and the making of the dictionary: the women’s suffrage movement and WWI. Williams includes lovely details about the workings of the Oxford University Press where the dictionary was printed, as well as other locations around Oxford, and the famous Scriptorium — a glorified shed — in the Murray’s garden where much of the work proceeded until Murray’s death.

But mainly she makes it entirely believable that a woman working on the dictionary might start a side project to recognize all the left out words. Gareth, a compositor at the press, finds Esme picking up slips of some of her collected words off the floor of the Scriptorium after a male assistant has dismissed her work as unimportant. Gareth asks her why words that are in common use aren’t in the dictionary. She explains where she gets her words. From “The poor. People who work at the Covered Market. Women. Which is why they’re not written down and why they’ve been excluded. Though sometimes they have been written down, but they’re still left out because they are not used in polite society. . . . They’re important.”

A delightful read. Entertaining, interesting, and full of heart and truth.

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Night Waking by Sarah Moss

Much of my reading lately has been about strong women; Night Waking is a novel about Anna Bennett, Dr. Bennett as she introduces herself to the police officer who insists on calling her Mrs. Cassingham (her husband Giles’ surname) when they interview her about the infant skeleton she and her son Raphael accidentally dug up as they planted an apple tree. Anna is an Oxford Fellow, working on a history of childhood in the 18th century. She’s with her family, Giles and Raphael and Timothy, who is still a toddler (the boys go by Raph and Moth, so hereafter I’ll call them that), on an island off the coast of Scotland, where Giles’ family has had a home for generations. Giles studies puffins, and to augment their academic earnings, they’ve made a vacation cottage out of an old building on the island and are about to host the first guests.

I first read Sarah Moss last winter when I chose Names for the Sea for one of my book bingo squares (a book set in a place I’d like to visit – although after I read Moss’s memoir of a year in Iceland, I wasn’t so sure). Her nonfiction writing is witty and smart, and so is Night Waking. Anna is fed up with caring for small children and managing the house (or not really, as she is frequently out of kitchen essentials, inconvenient when you live on an island with no shops) and mourning the loss of her intellectual life. This passage sums it up: “When we got to the beach, after passing half the morning in negotiation about putting on shoes, Moth walked into the sea and then had a tantrum because it was wet, and Raph stood with his back to the waves talking about potential uses of hydroelectricity on oil rigs. I sat on a rough rock, my arms wrapped around Moth as he drummed his heels on my shins and tried to bite my arms, and remembered the staircase in the Bodleian Library . . . . I decided that if I made Moth walk the whole five hundred metres back to the house he might take less than forty-five minutes to go to sleep after lunch and, if I didn’t rush him at all, stopped to inspect every pebble and touch each flowering grass, it might almost be time to start putting together an early lunch when we arrived.” Sound familiar, mothers of young moms out there?

Anna and Giles quarrel a bit, in a half hearted way, over the children and the work to be done and the work they’re not getting done, and Anna looks into the history of the island to try to determine why an infant might be buried there. There’s a side story about the family who come to stay — Zoe, an anorexic teen, her cardiologist workaholic father and housewife mother whose controlling attitude has driven her daughter to illness and despair. I didn’t like that storyline (I’m tired of the old trope of the mother causing anorexia), but it did move some of the story about Anna and Giles along. And Moss humanizes the harping mother, just a bit.

What I loved about the story is the way Moss wove Anna’s historical research into childhood and parenting and the lives of women and children on the island into the novel. The mystery of the infant skeleton is interesting, too. Of course I also appreciated the honest look at parenting — Anna is a bit extreme, but most parents of small children go through her familiar swings from boredom and exhaustion to almost overwhelming love and tenderness for their offspring. All in all it was a good read, one that made me chuckle at times, and that transported me to a faraway place and other people’s lives while also recognizing bits of my own, which is always enjoyable.

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