Esme is the protagonist of The Dictionary of Lost Words, and the novel follows her journey from early childhood all the way to her death at age 46. Esme’s lifelong connection with language becomes the novel’s empathetic lens for themes including class and gender hierarchies, the idea that words sometimes cannot encompass extremes of human experience, and the violence visited on female bodies.

Esme is deeply intelligent, but because she grows up sheltered in an upper class family, she cannot fully appreciate the privileges her life affords and how they contrast with those of her servant friend Lizzie. Though this failing evolves slightly as the novel progresses, Lizzie takes on the roles of Esme’s mother and caretaker despite being the same age.

Esme is more aware of the misogyny of her milieu, where women are not taken seriously as lexicographers despite doing the same work men do. One of the ways Esme breaks through her blinders about class issues is by sidestepping the OED project to collect the colloquialisms that form her alternative Women’s Words, many of which she learns from working- and lower-class women, who teach her slang considered taboo (because it is about women’s bodies) by the men putting together the OED.