Women and Dictionary Making: Gender, Genre, and English Language Lexicography by Lindsay Rose Russell (review)

“Women,” observes Lindsay Rose Russell, “have a way of fading into the wallpaper of lexicographical history” (9). They have most often figured in that story either as the beneficiaries of male dictionary-makers’ efforts (compilers of early dictionaries of “hard words” often explicitly identified women as, or among, the intended users) or else as helpmeets to lexicography’s Great Men. In this book Russell aims to broaden our understanding of the roles women have played in English dictionary-making since the early modern period, examining their contributions as patrons, enablers, and makers in their own right. Later on she also discusses the way twentieth-century feminists challenged, and in some cases subverted, the assumptions and conventions that had come to define the genre. Her approach thus combines the feminist projects of recovery—writing women back into a record that has erased or marginalized them—and critique. The resulting account, she proposes, “might be generative for the future of the genre” (19).

Chapter two, dealing with the early history of English dictionaries, highlights two capacities in which women have been marginalized. Anyone who reads a standard history of English lexicography will learn that many early English dictionaries were presented as resources for “ladies and gentlewomen” (as well as, in some instances, men of lower social rank), whose lack of access to classical education was thought to impede their comprehension of many formal words and terms of art that had been adopted into English. It is less often pointed out that the compilers of these wordlists were frequently indebted to women who did not fit this characterization of their sex—who, as members of royal or aristocratic families, had been extensively educated by private tutors, often attaining proficiency in Latin, Greek, and several modern foreign languages. James Murray, in his 1900 Romanes lecture on “The Evolution of English Lexicography,” mentioned nine women (including several monarchs or queen consorts—James I’s queen Anna, Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth I, Mary Tudor, Queen Anne)—who were named in early dictionaries as patrons, supporters, or inspirations. Russell also devotes a section of this chapter to a subset of dictionaries which acknowledged women as key sources and informants for the registers of language they documented (e.g., courtship or fashion), one of which, Mundus Muliebris (1690), was also compiled by a woman, Mary Evelyn.

The discussion of women as dictionary makers in their own right continues in chapter three, which considers a range of dictionaries or dictionary-like texts (they include pedagogic texts for children or domestic servants; lexicons of specialized terms from fields such as architecture, botany, chemistry, millinery, needlework, and nursing; and foreign-language and dialect glossaries) that were produced by women before the twentieth century. Such female-authored texts were not as rare as is often supposed: the table in which Russell lists and briefly describes them occupies twenty-five pages. While some of the authors’ names are familiar (Anna Barbauld, Elizabeth Elstob, Anne Fisher, Hester Piozzi), many are not. Particularly striking in this regard is the large number of bilingual dictionaries or glossaries, accounting for around a quarter of the titles listed, produced by British and American women engaged in missionary work alongside their husbands in Africa or Asia.

If these texts are considered peripheral to the English lexicographical tradition, it is less because of their makers’ sex than because they do not belong to the category which historians have tended to center in their accounts, namely the monolingual “general purpose” dictionary (though of course it is true, as Russell emphasizes throughout, that sex and genre are intersecting rather than totally discrete variables). That genre was Murray’s primary concern in his Romanes lecture: the references he made to women as addressees or enablers of early dictionary-making were there, Russell suggests, in part to underline that their role had diminished in importance as lexicography “evolved” into a more ambitious and...