Voices from the Past

A writer's "voice" is the term we use for his or her style, but to hear a writer's actual voice — especially a writer from the distant past like Alfred Lord Tennyson or Robert Browning is a treat. The excellent Poetry Archive has a collection of recordings of English language poets available online and on CDs. The British Library has just released The Spoken Word: British Writers and The Spoken Word: American Writers, a pair of CD boxed sets that contains many previously unpublished recordings of writers like Virginia Woolf (her only surviving recording), F Scott Fitzgerald, Doris Lessing, Gertrude Stein, E M Forster, and Lillian Hellman (who reads the letter she wrote to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952). Virginia Woolf's voice was crisper and more posh (think "Mrs. Dalloway") than the one I hear in my head while reading her work.