100 books like The Dictionary of Lost Words

Set in a mid-century department store, this wonderful short novel details life in a mid-20th-century frock department through the eyes of the women who worked there.

It is a book that highlights the importance of clothing in women’s lives at that time and the very specific kinds of garments. The tale follows Lisa as the news sales assistant in Cocktail Frocks and the friends she makes along the way. It is a sharply observed, funny, and tender story bringing the old department store alive.

If you’re a lover of women’s literature – Austen, the Brontës, Woolf – you are in for an utterly original treat with this mother-daughter odyssey. Australian Indigenous lawyer, Jasmine, takes her mother, Della, to England, wanting to indulge her passion for literature with a tour of significant dead-white-author sites. But what is really found along the way are the rich veins of ancient stories and the essential power we all possess: listening. This is a moving and intricate portrait of intergenerational, post-colonial trauma that examines whose stories get to be told and whose need to be told. For me, as an Australian and a lover of English literature, After Story is a slice of necessary truth-telling, which I predict will become an Australian classic of the future. 

Every Australian bookish girl knows Sybylla from My Brilliant Career. She is the original feisty heroine, the unashamed young feminist who rejects the isolation and low expectations of the bush and marriage at the turn of the twentieth century, wanting to strike out on her own as a writer. That her yearnings are so irrelevant to those around her and her ambitions unfulfilled act as a dare to all of us, and to me – to have that brilliant career, to tell your truths and have your independence, whether anyone else likes it or not. Equally as vivid, witty, and socially acute as Twain, if you read only one old and dusty novel about Australia, read this one.

Toni Jordan writes stories that defy genre pigeonholing, so she’s a woman after my own heart. The Fragments is a mystery about a missing manuscript and it’s also a complex piecing together of women’s personal histories. In the 1980s, in sleepy, sunny Brisbane, bookseller Caddie attends an exhibition of charred fragments from a famously lost novel of 1930s New York literary sensation, Inga Karlson – and meets an enigmatic stranger there who sparks Caddie’s obsession to uncover the truth of Inga’s life and death. A highly entertaining romp follows, full of mischievous twists, but, best of all, this novel holds another dare for me: that women’s lives and writing can and should sparkle with unpredictability.

It’s hard to find a new way into a well-known subject but Jill Liddington does it here with an entire book about just one day, census day 2 April 1911 when radical women disrupted the census by refusing to be enumerated by a state which gave them no rights. Overnight they filled dancehalls, private houses and camped on common land to evade the census takers. This is history as adventure story.

When I was in college, I asked my parents for the two-volume, compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary for Christmas one year. I was in a Friday afternoon etymology discussion group that the philosophy professor in charge of it had named “The Society of Harmless Drudges,” and the OED was our bible.

Many years later, reading this book, I was astonished at the many years and many contributors that went into the making of the original edition. One of the most unusual contributors, as Winchester explores, lived in a mental institution after having been judged criminally insane.

This is a great book because Montgomery is the opposite of a hero until he falls for Annabelle.

He is cold, unapproachable, and unhappy. Annabelle storms into his life on a crusade for women’s rights and turns everything he knows upside down. This book is fiercely feminist, and the relationship of the suffragists is important to the story.

Montgomery is on the opposite side of the women, but he eventually becomes Annabelle’s staunchest supporter. He abandons his own plans to support her, and that is a beautiful thing.

When, in the course of my research for my book, I first came across a newspaper article from 1939 reporting on the work of physicist Florence Bell with the stunned headline "Woman Scientist Explains," I think it took me about 5 minutes to recover from laughing. It’s a pity that the local press were more interested in the fact that Bell was a woman rather than her actual science, because only a year earlier she had shown for the first time how X-rays could reveal the regular, ordered structure of DNA. And as an undergraduate of Girton College, Cambridge, Bell’s talents as a physicist should have come as no surprise. For as historian Patricia Fara shows, Girton and the other all-female college, Newnham, were both intellectual crucibles from which emerged a generation of distinguished scientists such as physicist Hertha Ayrton, campaigning chemists Ida Smedley and Martha Whiteley, to name but… show more.

This book, published first in 1965 and then revised and reissued, was required reading when I was in graduate school. With this intellectual history of women’s suffrage, Kraditor sparked my interest in how ideas spur and shape political and social movements. Arguments, tactics, and strategies originate in the ideas of participants, and these ideas have consequences for how and what is eventually achieved. My favorite chapter explained the two kinds of arguments suffragists used. The argument from “justice” asserted women’s equal humanity with men, while the argument from “expediency” affirmed the benefits of extending women’s domestic caretaking into politics. 

My takeaway was that movements need multiple arguments to convince different constituencies to join and support their cause. Kraditor refused to whitewash the women’s suffrage movement and recounted how white, middle-class, native-born women also used ethnocentric and racist arguments to claim access to the ballot. 

Until relatively recently the American suffrage movement was told only from the White perspective; Black women’s contributions were minimized -  when they received any mention at all. Terborg-Penn’s groundbreaking work challenged that viewpoint through her extensive original research that revealed the stories of Black women activists who worked for suffrage within their own clubs when they were discouraged from joining the mainstream white organizations. 

This book is a bit dry and academic but is well worth a read because it brings to light amazing women such as Mary Church Terrell or Frances Ellen Watkins Harper who fought both racism and sexism in their efforts to win voting rights for all American women.