“I want to decide my life for me,” says Esme Nichols, the fictional protagonist of Pip Williams’ bestselling 2020 novel The Dictionary of Lost Words.
Esme has spent her whole life around the desks of the scriptorium, or “scrippy”: the workplace of the real Sir James Murray, lead editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. Murray worked on the dictionary from 1879, starting at the letter A, until his death in 1915, when they were working on the volumes for S. With her mother dying in childbirth, Esme grew up at the feet of her father and the other men who worked for him.
