Let’s all thank our lucky stars for the enlightened souls at the BBC who saved eight minutes of Virginia Woolf’s recorded voice. It is the only recording of her voice that has survived from the three broadcasts she did for the BBC in the 1930s.
Now Woolf’s voice, along with those of other great writers of the 20th century, can be heard in its entirety for the first time on a three-disc set of CDs produced by the British Library called “The Spoken Word: British Writers.”
The set features the voices of 30 British writers and includes many previously unpublished recordings. Another set, “The Spoken Word: American Writers,” features 27 authors from the U.S.
When Woolf’s recordings were made, people simply didn’t keep radio broadcasts, according to Richard Fairman of the British Library. “They went out on the air and that was it; they were lost forever,” Fairman told NPR‘s Melissa Block.
“The recording of Woolf is nothing like the interviews common on the radio today,” he said.
Hearing the voices of famous authors on CD is “not quite as good as having them walk up to you, but it’s not bad,” he told the Telegraph.
You can listen to Woolf talk about “Craftsmanship” in the series “Words Fail Me,” which was broadcast on the BBC April 29, 1937, here.
On You Tube, you can watch a video featuring a record spinning on a turntable that gives us eight minutes of Vita Sackville-West reading from her prize-winning poem “The Land.” The recording was made by Columbia in 1931 for the International Education Society.
You can also search the British Library’s online archive of more than 1,500 sound recordings that it has made here.
Read more in brief about the British Library CD sets of famous authors in the London Review of Books, Time and the Telegraph.
[…] Woolf’s voice, along with those of other great writers of the 20th century, can also be heard on a three-disc set of CDs produced by the British Library called “The Spoken Word: British Writers.” Read more. […]
It is lovely to see how well these recordings are being received around the world. They reflect the breadth and depth of the British Library Sound Archive.
The recordings kindly allude to at the end of this post will always present a minor offering as the Sound Archive holds some 3,500,000 recordings many of which cannot appear online for various reasons. All of these recordings (including all the ones on the site) can be listened to on the British Library’s premises in London and Yorkshire by making a listening and viewing appointment. For more information on the Sound Archive and access to the full catalogue of its holdings please visit:
http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/bldept/soundarch/index.html
The Archival Sound Recordings site actually contains some 13,500 recordings from the archive of which 1,500 (mentioned in the post) are freely available for anyone to listen to. The site will increasingly hold more recordings for the purposes of teaching, learning and research but it should not be considered as the Sound Archive which holds both analogue and digitised recordings from around the globe.
Peter Findlay, Project Manger – Archival Sound Recording