The Bookbinder of Jericho is a companion novel to Pip Williams’ international bestseller, The Dictionary of Lost Words. Word of mouth will ensure that it will walk off the shelves, because it is the kind of historical novel that people like: a triumph of adversity set in a recognisable landscape, with a feisty female character with brains and a heart. But whereas The Dictionary of Lost Words had a universality of theme that appeals because it explored the gendered and social limitations of ‘approved’ language, (see my review), The Bookbinder of Jericho is not so much about ‘knowledge withheld’ as about the class system in England during WW1. Peggy Jones isn’t denied entry to Oxford because she’s a woman, it’s because she’s working-class.
And while that’s quite interesting, as historian Clare Wright has shown us, it is in sharp contrast to Australia, which in the early 20th century was internationally recognised as one of the most progressive societies in the world. Women had the vote from the time of federation in 1901, and old money and old class systems had been faltering in influence throughout the 19th century. In allowing women like Peggy’s wealthy friend Gwen to study but not to graduate until 1920, Britain England was well behind Australia where women had been admitted to the University of Melbourne since 1881 and Julia Margaret (Bella) Guérin became the first female graduate of an Australian University, with a BA in 1883 and then a Master of Arts in 1885.
For many of us, The Dictionary of Lost Words introduced an aspect of history that had been hidden. But The Bookbinder of Jericho with its theme of working-class womanhood breaking down educational barriers traverses familiar territory. The 20th century was a period when the barriers to education, and women’s education in particular, gradually broke down. Though the pace was faster in Australia than in England, women were admitted to universities, and awarded degrees. There were gendered social and structural restrictions that had to be dealt with in the transitional period, and economic barriers limited access as well. And though less so in Australia, as in England, there were class barriers. It was all much harder to do without role models, and people of any gender from outside the establishment were made to feel like trespassers when they ventured into the halls of higher education. Today, it is still easier if you are rich. But everything is easier if you are rich…
Williams focusses her working-class character’s ambitions on Oxford, delineating the class distinctions between Peggy the narrator, and Gwen — ‘Town’ and ‘Gown’. The contrast is between the working-class people who do the bookbinding at the Oxford University Press, and the upper-class people at the university who use those books to study, and are free to be dilettantes like Gwen. Into this mix come WW1 refugees and the wounded from Belgium: Lottie, a librarian from Louvain who has experienced devastating loss, and the badly disfigured but still eligible love interest Bastiaan. In different ways both these characters provide support for Peggy in her quest.
The novel is also a character study of the ways in which caring for others can be a limitation on achievement. The principal at Somerville College delivers an address about how intelligent women should not succumb to the pressure to volunteer to help the flood of wounded men and to fill the empty places in industry, but some women do it anyway. (Having battled parental obstacles to get a place at Oxford, the real life Vera Brittain famously gave it up to volunteer.) Or like Peggy and her wealthy mentor Gwen, they ‘do it all’. Peggy volunteers after her day’s work at the bindery when she should be studying for the entrance exam, and Gwen volunteers when she should be studying for her course.
Aunt Tilda, volunteering on the battlefields, provides a woman’s perspective on the carnage through her letters.
The novel also explores how caring for others can be a self-imposed limitation. Since her mother’s death, Peggy is responsible for her neurodivergent twin sister. Maude doesn’t actually need her as much as Peggy thinks she does because Maude blossoms within the mutually respectful relationship with Lottie. But Peggy’s relationship with Maude fulfils two contrasting roles in the novel: it gives her an excuse to abandon her ambition when she fears failure, and it gives her an excuse to defer any relationship with Bastiaan in favour of study rather than marriage. Maude’s independence rests on routine: on the satisfying work she does at the bindery and on the accepting circle of people who care about her. It wouldn’t translate readily to Belgium, and even if Britain let the refugees stay after the war, Bastiaan (an architect) has work to do restoring the shattered battlefields in his homeland.
All this is interesting enough, and Williams is not too heavy-handed with resentments against the patriarchy. But, for me, the intricacies of bookbinding filled too many pages: it is just not as interesting as the intricacies of creating the Oxford Dictionary. What I really liked was Peggy’s discovery that translation matters. When she is struggling with learning ‘useless’ Ancient Greek to overcome the final barrier to university entrance, Miss Garnell the librarian shows her how a reader is at the mercy of the translator, their times, their perspective and their gender. She reads the lofty translations that posit Odysseus as hero on his return to Ithaca, and then she draws attention to the hero’s revenge against the suitors who besieged Penelope in his absence.
‘Now let’s see how our modern scholars have interpreted it.’
She found the relevant page in each of the translations, including Ma’s, and laid them beside each other. ‘So, remember, Odysseus has returned to Penelope after twenty years, found his house full of suitors and slain them. But he doesn’t stop there,’ she said, and her finger jabbed at each line in turn. ‘He tells his son to kill the women who lay with the suitors. And no matter what translation you read, we are told that they are strung up by their necks so their deaths are an agony, and their feet twitch until there is no more life in them.’ She straightened. Took a deep breath. Looked at me. ‘What are we to think of these women?’ (p.336.)
One translator calls them ‘maidens’, another as ‘handmaids’ akin to servants, and another as ‘prostitutes’. Why does it matter? Miss Garnell explains that the words used to describe us define our value to society and determine our capacity to contribute. And they also tell others how to feel about us, how to judge us. A direct translation would be females, but that is not, says Miss Garnell, an apt translation for our times. Homer did not need to tell his listeners that these women were slaves; they knew that. But a modern translation needs to be explicit, so that contemporary readers understand that the women had no choice.
‘They were bondmaids,’ I said. Slave girl. Bonded servant. Bound to serve until death. It had been in Women’s Words.
‘Exactly. They couldn’t refuse to go with the suitors any more than they could refuse to do the laundry. But the reader might think less of a prostitute who has been paid, or a maiden who has gone with the suitors of her own free will. And they will not judge Odysseus so harshly for the punishment that he oversees.’
‘And so he remains a hero.’
‘Quite,’ said Miss Garnell, and she closed each book. ‘In my opinion, the men who translate Homer have not always served the women well.’ (p.337)
That, of course, sent me to the Fagles 1996 edition of The Odyssey, translated nearly a century after this fictional conversation, to see how a more modern translation fares. (I have sampled Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation and found that she’d killed the poetry.) Fagles tells us about the cruel deaths, and he doesn’t use the word slave though the women bear the yoke of service. But Odysseus’s old nurse tells him that they all went tramping to their shame, thumbing their noses at [her] at the queen herself. (The Odyssey, by Homer, translated by Robert Fagles, Penguin Classics, 1996, ISBN 9780140268867, p.452)
Alas, there is no Duolingo course in Ancient Greek!
Author: Pip Williams
Title: The Bookbinder of Jericho
Cover design by Andy Warren & Affirm Press
Publisher: Affirm Press, 2023
ISBN: 9781922806628, pbk., 432 pages
Review copy courtesy of Affirm Press
ANZ LitLovers LitBlog 
I still haven’t read the Lost Words one yet so I think I’ll focus on that. But this sounds interesting. I’m interested in book binding but also the translation aspect of course.
LikeLike
By: whisperinggums on April 21, 2023
at 1:15 pm
Well, the translation bit is only a little bit towards the end, it’s just that I zeroed in on it because it’s a bit of a hobby horse of mine.
I’ve always wanted to read the Russian classics in the original, but I now know from my efforts in reading in French, that I’m probably never going to achieve that.
Still, most people have never read the Russians at all, so I’m not going to beat myself up over it.
LikeLiked by 1 person
By: Lisa Hill on April 21, 2023
at 1:35 pm
Sounds sensible to me … there are many thinks we are never going to do!
LikeLiked by 1 person
By: whisperinggums on April 21, 2023
at 2:53 pm
This sounds interesting as class doesn’t often get a prominent position IMO though I identify as working class so am biased. I did purchase her first novel but did not finish and can’t remember why. As for the book binding am very interested as William Collins publisher was a place I knew from my Glasgow upbringing and also some young women who worked there. In retrospect I wish it had been part of my work life rather than the boring clerical jobs I mostly did.
LikeLike
By: Fay K on April 21, 2023
at 2:11 pm
Well, from Pip Williams’ description, I think that the bookbinding was like most factory work. It lost any satisfaction to be had by adopting the Henry Ford system where workers did the same repetitive tasks all day, without assembling the finished product themselves. Peggy gets some enjoyment out of reading the bits of books that come her way, and sometimes she gets to read the whole thing because a mistake has been made and a book isn’t good enough to sell, so she takes it home. But it’s basically a boring job.
My mother originally took up bookbinding to reduce the cost of getting my father’s journals bound together into an annual each year, and she did a TAFE course in it, but she grew to like it as a hobby because did the entire process herself, eventually even learning how to do the title on the spine and front cover. She bound an entire class set of tattered dictionaries at one school I worked at, which saved us a lot of money in replacements.
LikeLike
By: Lisa Hill on April 21, 2023
at 3:24 pm
I’ve often thought I’d love to learn bookbinding. I lurk around those little shopfronts sometimes with their gorgeous tools and faces creased with concentration and … dream.
LikeLike
By: karenlee thompson on April 21, 2023
at 4:28 pm
Just butting into this conversation, if that’s okay, to say that I learnt how to fold and sew the pages, then bind and make the covers. I made my own journals for a few years. I’d happily teach you, Karenlee, if you are anywhere near Canberra! It’s good fun, and very satisfying.
LikeLike
By: robyncadwallader on April 21, 2023
at 7:44 pm
What a generous offer!
LikeLike
By: Lisa Hill on April 21, 2023
at 8:52 pm
Oh how wonderful that would be Robyn. I am constantly travelling overseas these days, but should I ever find myself in Canberra again, I’ll look you up!
LikeLike
By: karenlee thompson on April 22, 2023
at 5:43 pm
It’s a deal, Karenlee!
LikeLike
By: robyncadwallader on April 22, 2023
at 5:55 pm
You’re thinking of those gorgeous shops in Florence and Venice, yes?
LikeLike
By: Lisa Hill on April 21, 2023
at 8:42 pm
Actually, I still haven’t made it to Italy! The ones There were some lovely ones in Prague and in many smaller towns and villages in Germany and the Nordic countries. Florence is high on my list for a visit.
LikeLiked by 1 person
By: karenlee thompson on April 22, 2023
at 5:44 pm
I would just point out that while Oxford didn’t allow women to actually get a degree until after WWI – and Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby were among the first women to be able to fully graduate – and Cambridge was decades behind – women could graduate from other English universities earlier – for example the University of Manchester and I think the University of London. I say English because I’m not sure about the situation for Scotland which has retained a separate education system, or Wales, or Ireland while it remained under British rule – and Northern Ireland after that.
Early women graduates from Manchester included Christabel Pankhurst and Alison Uttley. My great grandmother Dorothy Owen gained a BA and MA from the University of London (I’m not totally sure which part of it – Margaret Forster wrote about her in a book called Good Wives).
LikeLike
By: elkiedee on April 21, 2023
at 3:24 pm
Wow, thanks for this, I didn’t know that. My father was a graduate of London University, but I think that was because people who’d served in the armed forces were given entrance opportunities. I don’t know if the government paid the fees or his employer did, I never thought to ask him.
LikeLike
By: Lisa Hill on April 21, 2023
at 3:29 pm
I will have to read this book, given that the subjects include women at work, OUP and that the Jericho area of Oxford is a setting. So many family connections there.
LikeLike
By: elkiedee on April 21, 2023
at 3:28 pm
AH, it’s lovely when a book has those sorts of resonances.
LikeLike
By: Lisa Hill on April 21, 2023
at 3:29 pm
I enjoyed this more than TDOLW I think. It may have had something to do with reading it whilst I was unwell (it was just the escapist historical fiction I needed). I also have a thing for WWI stories.
I found the bindery scenes fascinating, almost like a dance or a meditative routine. I understand that for many people this kind of work could be dull or repetitive, but at different times, I have done this work (packing groceries, processing corn cobs, counting cars) and like Peggy, I usually found a way to make it work for me. I loved finding the rhythm or the most efficient way to complete the job.
LikeLike
By: Brona's Books on April 21, 2023
at 5:46 pm
Ah, well, there we differ, because I am a bit tired of authors mining WW1 and WW2 as a backdrop.
LikeLike
By: Lisa Hill on April 21, 2023
at 7:19 pm
I had mixed feelings about the Lost Words novel. I think I recall she riffed on the word ‘bondmaiden’ there – but i might be misremembering. Seems like she’s ‘done’ lexicography, and has moved on to bookbinding. What next: hand-made vellum?!
LikeLike
By: Tredynas Days on April 21, 2023
at 7:59 pm
Any smart author takes advantage of bestsellerdom. What matters is what comes next: will she stick with commercial historical fiction, or will she do what Graham Greene did and use ‘entertainments’ to subsidise time to write really meaningful books? To me, TDOLW showed hints of that promise…
LikeLike
By: Lisa Hill on April 21, 2023
at 8:51 pm
I read Williams’ first book and enjoyed the discussion about women’s words.
As for universities and women, my understanding is that Edinburgh announced it would accept women for degrees in 1881, and it was followed the same year by Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide (who all claim to be first).
LikeLike
By: wadholloway on April 21, 2023
at 9:28 pm
Firsts are indeed tricky. In Britain there was a big gap between being admitted to study and being allowed to graduate, and you’ll notice that what I’ve quoted from the UniMelb site, is the date when they admitted women (1881), for which they don’t claim to be first, and the date of the first graduand (1883), for which they do claim to be first. But I am not the least surprised that Edinburgh also admitted women in 1881 — and depending on which month these events occurred may well have been first in the world… because Edinburgh was, they say still is, an intellectual powerhouse.
When I went looking to confirm my belief that Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey was the ‘first’ by a woman, I discovered that I was wrong. Other women had translated the Odyssey before her, just not into English. Naming her as ‘first’ which we are wont to do in the Anglosphere, (as that link on her name in my post makes clear) “eclipses the fact that there are already multiple translations of The Odyssey by women in modern languages, such as Turkish and Italian.”
LikeLike
By: Lisa Hill on April 22, 2023
at 10:20 am
Anything with bookbinder or elated in the title always has me thinking I want to read it. My last jaunt in that direction was The Binding by Bridget Collins and to be honest it was not for me. I actually did a bookbinding apprenticeship in the mid 1970s and though I was a very poor and sloppy hand binder, I moved on as soon as I could, the demise of this veritable old craft fills me with no joy. I am yet to read anything by Pip Williams but based on both your reviews Lisa I think I will look out for these.
LikeLike
By: fourtriplezed on April 22, 2023
at 7:52 am
I dunno… I’m getting a bit cynical in my old age… I used to love books about books but these days it’s often just a ploy to market books to booklovers. Though there are worthy exceptions including The Dictionary of Lost Words. My favourite of these is not a novel, it’s a bio memoir: The Book Collectors of Daraya (2020), by Delphine Minoui, translated by Lara Vergnaud…
LikeLiked by 1 person
By: Lisa Hill on April 22, 2023
at 10:27 am
Well, I haven’t even read the first, so I’ve been trying my best to avoid the news/hype/reviews about this one, but you’ve made it sound like something I might like. Think I need to read Lost Words first, though…
LikeLike
By: kimbofo on April 22, 2023
at 11:45 am
If you’re doubtful about hype (aren’t we all?) then I’d suggest TDOLW because it is IMHO a more interesting book.
LikeLike
By: Lisa Hill on April 22, 2023
at 12:06 pm
I keep vacillating about getting this one. I didn’t read The Dictionary of Lost Words, would I be better off with that one? Though I do like the details of bookbinding, having been a special collections library assistant and having worked on a project about textual and other variants and spending a lot of time checking gatherings in the past!
LikeLike
By: Liz Dexter on April 23, 2023
at 1:23 am
If you have to choose, I’d suggest TDOLW. I mean, back in the 70s, part of the feminist project was to understand the ways in which language was used to diminish and marginalise women (actress, air hostess, etc,) but what TDOLW brought that was new to me was the way that the meanings of all kinds of words was gendered in ways that I hadn’t realised. It shifted my thinking.
Whereas with TBOJ, there’s nothing new in this story of lack of access to education for women and working-class people in the C20th. It’s just enjoyable hist-fic.
LikeLike
By: Lisa Hill on April 23, 2023
at 9:13 am
I started “Lost Words”. but didn’t get very far with it. I just didn’t seem to be in the mood for it at that time and then of course life moved on and hundreds of other books got published so I never went back to it.
I might enjoy the details about binding if they are well blended into the narrative rather than just used because the author has done their research and is determined not to waste that effort
LikeLike
By: BookerTalk on April 27, 2023
at 7:22 am
Yes, that’s always the problem, isn’t? Research does make a better book, IMO but there’s a fine line …
LikeLike
By: Lisa Hill on April 27, 2023
at 8:33 am
My goodness – it won’t be available here (US) until August! It’s on my Wish List and I’m looking forward to when they “alert” me. :-)
LikeLike
By: Becky Lindroos on May 3, 2023
at 10:33 am
That’s a while to wait!
LikeLike
By: Lisa Hill on May 3, 2023
at 10:41 am