From her jacket pocket, Megan Brooks takes a white envelope, and from it she carefully slides out a frail slip of paper, yellowed with age. This, and only this, she places on the lectern, gently smoothing it with her gloved hands.
She looks out to the auditorium. She has done this a thousand times, but this time will be her last. What she is about to say has taken her a lifetime to understand, and she knows it is important.
Her eyes focus on the middle row, and she scans individual faces quickly, not settling. They are mostly men, but there are quite a few women. They are all well into their careers. She can feel a restlessness beginning in the vast space, but she ignores it and scans the row below, then the row below that. She notes faces beginning to turn towards their neighbours, whispering. Still, she continues her search.
At the second row from the front, she pauses. There is a young woman, surely no more than an undergraduate student. She is at the beginning of her journey with words, and there is a curiosity in her face that satisfies the old woman. She smiles. It is a reason to start. Megan Brooks picks up the slip.
‘Bondmaid,’ she says. ‘For a while, this beautiful, troubling word belonged to my mother.’
This book began as two simple questions: Do words mean different things to men and women? And if they do, is it possible that we have lost something in the process of defining them?
I have had a love–hate relationship with words and dictionaries my whole life. I have trouble spelling words and I frequently use them incorrectly (affluent, after all, sounds so much like effluent, it really is an easy mistake to make). As a child, when I used to ask the adults in my life for help, they would say, ‘look it up in the dictionary’, but when you can’t spell, the dictionary can be an impenetrable thing. Despite my clumsy handling of the English language, I have always loved how writing words down in a particular way can create a rhythm, or conjure an image, or express an emotion. It has been the greatest irony of my life that I should choose words to explore my inner and outer worlds.
A few years ago, a good friend suggested I read Simon Winchester’s The Surgeon of Crowthorne. It is a non-fiction account of the relationship between the Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, James Murray, and one of the more prolific (and notorious) volunteers, Dr William Chester Minor. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but I was left with the impression that the Dictionary was a particularly male endeavour. From what I could glean, all the editors were men, most of the assistants were men, most of the volunteers were men and most of the literature, manuals and newspaper articles used as evidence for how words were used, were written by men. Even the Delegates of the Oxford University Press – those who held the purse strings – were men.
Where, I wondered, are the women in this story, and does it matter that they are absent?
It took me a while to find the women, and when I did, they were cast in minor and supporting roles. There was Ada Murray, who raised eleven children and ran a household at the same time as supporting her husband in his role as Editor. There was Edith Thompson and her sister Elizabeth Thompson, who between them provided 15,000 quotations, for A and B alone, and continued to provide quotations and editorial assistance until the last word was published. There were Hilda, Elsie and Rosfrith Murray, who all worked in the Scriptorium to support their father. And there was Eleanor Bradley, who worked at the Old Ashmolean as part of her father’s team of assistants. There were also countless women who sent in quotations for words. Finally, there were women who wrote novels and biographies and poetry that were considered as evidence for the use of one word or another. But in all cases, they were outnumbered by their male counterparts, and history struggles to recall them at all.
I decided that the absence of women did matter. A lack of representation might mean that the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was biased in favour of the experiences and sensibilities of men. Older, white, Victorian-era men at that.
This novel is my attempt to understand how the way we define language, might define us. Throughout, I have tried to conjure images and express emotions that bring our understanding of words into question. By putting Esme among the words, I was able to imagine the effect they might have had on her, and the effect she might have had on them.
From the beginning, it was important that I weave Esme’s fictional story through the history of the Oxford English Dictionary as we know it. I soon realised that this history also included the women’s suffrage movement in England as well as World War I. In all three cases the timelines of events and the broad details have been preserved. Any errors are unintentional.
Perhaps the biggest challenge in writing this book was being true to the real-life people who inhabited its historical context. I am not alone in my fascination with the Oxford English Dictionary, and I devoured the work of dictionary scholars and biographers. Lynda Mugglestone’s book Lost for Words gave me the confidence to accept that women’s words were indeed treated differently to those of men, at least sometimes. Peter Gilliver’s book The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary furnished my story with facts and anecdotes that I hope anchor it in truth. Twice, I had the privilege of visiting the Oxford University Press, where the Oxford English Dictionary archives are held. I searched through
