Best-selling novel The Dictionary of Lost Words headed for the Canberra stage

Posted on 27 September, 2024

Excitement (noun): The feeling you get when you hear that Pip Williams’ best-selling novel is coming to the Canberra Theatre Centre stage.

Published in March 2020, and the recipient of a slew of literary prizes in 2021, Pip Williams’ Australian and New York Times bestselling book The Dictionary of Lost Words has captured the hearts and minds of book lovers around the world.

It was poignant, heartbreaking, and – it’s worth noting – the first Australian novel to be selected for Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club. And four years after it was first published, it’s still popping up on reading lists.

Spanning decades, the meticulously researched historical fiction novel combines fact and fiction to tell the fascinating tale of how, in 1901, the word ‘Bondmaid’ was discovered missing from the Oxford English Dictionary.

The Dictionary of Lost Words is the story of the girl who stole it – and the power of language to shape the world.

Coming to Canberra Theatre Centre in May 2025, the beloved book will be coming to life in a critically acclaimed stage adaptation by South Australian playwright, Verity Laughton.

“I share Esme’s bewitchment with words. They’re almost physical to me and have been since I was tiny. It’s a susceptibility to the way words work in the world and an appreciation of how magical they are,” says Verity.

“In terms of writing the piece, I knew that the words had been front and centre and that they had to be embedded into the structure and the form of how the play turned out.”

Set during the creation of the very first Oxford English Dictionary, the novel spans the life of Esme, a young woman who grows up in the Scriptorium – a converted garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of lexicographers gather words.

Hiding beneath the sorting table, she collects words that have been rejected or neglected by the men working there and begins her own compilation: The Dictionary of Lost Words.

Following Esme from her childhood into adulthood at the height of the women’s suffrage movement and the beginning of the First World War, the story is told completely from her perspective. Learning and growing alongside Esme, the reader explores the world through her observations – including the realisation that little importance is placed on recording the words and meanings relating to women’s experiences.

While the book is set over a century ago, it’s for this reason that Verity believes that The Dictionary of Lost Words continues to resonate with readers and audiences.

“It covers the experience of generations of women being made invisible and how they had to achieve their goals in a secretive way, sometimes secretive even to themselves,” she says.

“I think it weaves a spell. It’s almost dreamlike in some of the circularities in Esme’s thinking and efforts. It’s a bewitchment of experience and many women find themselves within that frame of existence.”

Revealing a lost narrative hidden in a history written by men, from actresses to suffragettes, market traders, and workers, The Dictionary of Lost Words is all about the power of amplifying female voices.

It’s also about the many meanings of the word ‘love’. But to find out what happens, you’ll have to see it (or read it) for yourself.

“I think the audience is coming to the show to get the experience of reading the book in three-dimensional form,” says Verity.

“In a way, they’ll be given permission to have fun with it [my adaptation]. There’s a lot of humour, there are some laugh-out-loud scenes. Although it’s serious and tender, it’s also engaging and endearing. Like the book.”

Reread (verb): What we’ll be doing with the book as we count down to May.