Who’s ever heard Virginia Woolf?

Hearing the voice of a long-dead writer adds another dimension to a reader’s connection with an author’s work, not profound, but intimate. It can also be surprising. Many years ago, I was jolted by a record of James Joyce reading a delirious passage from Finnegans Wake, an often incomprehensible but nevertheless enchanting experiment.

Until then, Joyce had existed for me only as words on the page. He was disembodied, the pure spirit of the English language at one of its greater moments. I was therefore astonished to hear him speaking much like a stage Irishman, rather in the style of Barry Fitzgerald, who played a series of lovable priests and cops in Hollywood films. Joyce’s accent made it clear that even late in life he remained intensely grounded in Dublin, the city he escaped before unfolding his genius. That subtly changed my feelings about him. It made him more local, more obviously the magnificent product of one particular time and place. “All talent is clannish,” said Isaac Bashevis Singer. Joyce was triumphantly clannish, and never more than in his speech.

For those of us who enjoy this kind of contact, Richard Fairman of the British Library has been rooting through his sound archives to make collections of authorial speech, most recently in a three-CD set, The Spoken Word: British Writers ( http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/sound.html),an assortment of utterances by 30 writers. Today, when every interesting author gets recorded often, it’s surprising to learn from Fairman that there is exactly one known recording of Arthur Conan Doyle’s voice extant, and also only one of Virginia Woolf’s. They both lived well into the age of sound recording (Conan Doyle died in 1930, Woolf in 1941) but the idea of preserving voices hadn’t yet taken hold among broadcasters and librarians. Read more.