The Dictionary of Lost Words

The horrific catastrophe of the First World War again highlights the difficulty of representing extremes of human experience through language, connecting with the theme of the Relationship between Language and Community. Although Esme still relies on words to communicate her feelings, sharing the paper slips for “Love” and “Eternal” with Gareth to indicate the depth of her commitment to him, the war’s losses show Esme the boundaries and limitations of dictionaries: “Of some experiences, the Dictionary would only ever provide an approximation. Sorrow, I already knew, was one of them” (316). Gareth finds it hard to express what he sees on the front lines in his letters home—language seems too clinical to fully convey the images and psychic shocks of war. Conversely, for Bertie, words have collapsed into the objects they represent—his shell shock (the psychological condition now known as PTSD) reacts identically to the idea of bombs and to the word itself. These responses to the collapse of language are a microcosm of the zeitgeist that was more broadly reflected in the formal and structural experiments of Modernism, an aesthetic movement that arose in direct reaction to WWI.

The OED and Esme’s Women’s Words and Their Meanings exist in opposition to this linguistic slippage—they are full of Oxfordian absolutes and material tangibility. Just as Europe is being so destroyed and fractured that British authors like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf deconstruct language entirely, Esme’s Dictionary of Lost Words reifies her finds, growing from a single lost slip in a box under a maid’s bed to a bound book that collects and values words from underrepresented communities. The book as an object becomes important as well. Esme learns about Gareth’s work as a compositor, finds the printing trays he assembled for her work, and, after his death, pushes to have the book included in the library as a volume of scholarly significance. The physical presence of her dictionary caries several symbolic resonances: her quest to be taken seriously as a scholar in a sexist world, her belief in the importance of recording colloquial words, and the love between her and Gareth.

Esme’s refusal to completely concede the limitations of language leads her to become an effective nurse for the war wounded. She discovers how to sidestep some trauma by moving from one language to another. It is telling that the language of hope is Esperanto (a word that literally means “one who hopes”)—an artificial international language created by Jewish ophthalmologist L.L. Zamenhoff in 1887 in the idealistic attempt to end miscommunication and thus usher in an era of peace. Her initial success to replace the violent associations of English with Esperanto leads Esme to participate in the creation of a new linguistic therapy program.

The narrative closes with echoes of its beginning: the Scriptorium is dismantled, signaling the end of an era, and the word “Bondmaid” is recovered and reclaimed, bookending the novel with the suggestion that people have the ability to shape language into what they need it to be.