Virginia Woolf

So I love reading Virginia Woolf. Have all of the essays, diaries, novels, short stories and letters. Love them. The complexity, playfulness, command of language. The courage and intelligence, the glorious internal revelations (Cam in To the Lighthouse, for instance), the ... well. I've trekked to her childhood home and wondered why the only notice on the wall was for her father, Leslie Stephen. She was such a genius, and the force of her brain comes through most clearly in her essays and reviews.

But my god, I have never heard her voice before today.

And today, I am, I am, well, overcome with the weirdness of hearing the voice of this author who has always spoken in my mind, as I read, with some voice that must have been much closer to my own. (Do people hear other voices besides their own when they read? Hm.)

Hermione Lee, one of many Woolf biographers and one of the best, wrote, "If you listen to the only surviving recording of her, you hear a voice from another century, which to us sounds posh, antiquated, class-bound, mannered." Um, I think that's fair to say. Also? It's just weird. A weird experience, a voice that sounds ... weird. So unlike the playful qualities of Orlando, unlike the vulnerabilities in the diaries. Unlike the arch gossip of the letters. Ah. Just wow.

Want to hear it? You'll need RealPlayer.

BBC clip of a lecture on words.