If a plucky young woman is told, “Your job, Miss Jones, is to bind the books, not read them,” what’s she going to do?

I think we know. And if you’re reading a book review in a newspaper, I think we know you’re going to like Pip Williams’ “The Bookbinder,” a literary confection guaranteed to delight lovers of books and words — and plucky young women fighting the patriarchy for a chance to study at Oxford.

Well, Somerville, the women’s college at Oxford in the year 1913, which is where we find Peggy Jones, 17, working on the “women’s side” of a book bindery and pocketing marred or poorly bound pages to add to the collection lining the narrowboat where she lives with Maude, her identical twin. Well, not quite identical — Maude seems to have a mild variety of autism and/or echolalia. And, though “she wasn’t simple, despite what people thought,” Maude needs some looking after.

Maude is the excuse Peggy makes for leaving school and staying at the bindery. Maude also works there, as did their recently deceased Ma, whose stalwart spirit haunts the sisters and whose bereft friend, Tilda, graces the story with a droll, occasionally wise worldliness. Manly tradition thwarts Peg’s secret scholarly ambition, but the also-manly First World War presents new opportunities, including the chance of romance with a wounded Belgian officer she tends as a volunteer (because of course she does!).

“The Bookbinder” seems a natural follow-up to Williams’ well-loved, Reese’s Book Club-blessed first novel, “The Dictionary of Lost Words,” which occupied the same milieu. It even provides a sly subplot, when a compositor approaches Peg for help binding a friend’s book of “women’s words” — precisely the dictionary being assembled in the earlier novel.

If it can seem that the politics of sex and class are somewhat overwhelming in this story, it’s also hard to imagine how formidable the dominance of maleness and wealth might have seemed before our age of enlightenment.

There are any number of pitfalls of cliche and predictability that Williams could’ve fallen into but, other than the inevitable happy ending (it’s probably not a spoiler to say Peg does not die tragically), she largely avoids them. She creates complex characters and frequently confronts them with surprising developments — not always easy in a novel that inserts itself squarely into history.

The Oxford of “The Bookbinder” was and is very real, including Somerville College, the university press where Peggy works, and the books she handles. The army base camp at Étaples, France — from which Tilda, a volunteer, dispatches letters — was also real, as were the atrocities that figure in these characters’ lives.

Williams’ characters seem to truly inhabit this history. They also show us, quite naturally, the mechanics of bookbinding, matriculation at Oxford and life on a narrowboat in the early 20th century. Finally, though, it is the original and complicated character of Peg that proves irresistible. The often unexpected ways she responds to the fixed circumstances of her time make her story and Williams’ work a pleasure.