Spoken in Her Own Voice

Portrait of Virginia Woolf by Roger Fry, circa 1917;
image via Wikipedia Commons

Here’s what’s great about this recording: While Woolf is not speaking extemporaneously but presenting a prepared talk, as was the style in the early days of radio, she’s witty, wise, instructive, and downright funny.

Words, she says, “are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most un-teachable of all things. Of course, you can catch them and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries. But words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind…. And how do they live in the mind? Variously and strangely, much as human beings live, ranging hither and thither, falling in love, and mating together. It is true that they are much less bound by ceremony and convention than we are. Royal words mate with commoners….

“They are highly democratic, too; they believe that one word is as good as another; uneducated words are as good as educated words, uncultivated words as good as cultivated words, there are no ranks or titles in their society. Nor do they like being lifted out on the point of a pen and examined separately. They hang together, in sentences, paragraphs, sometimes for whole pages at a time. They hate being useful; they hate making money; they hate being lectured about in public. In short, they hate anything that stamps them with one meaning or confines them to one attitude, for it is their nature to change.”

Before you listen to the Woolf recording, you might want to listen to this brief NPR report (it’s less than five minutes) about the Spoken Word series, which puts the Woolf recording into historical context—and also includes a funny snippet from Vladamir Nabokov describing the difficulties of writing. (If you don’t see the NPR audio play box below, click on this link to hear the report at NPR.)

Finally, here’s Virginia Woolf in her own voice, a seven-minute, 39-second recording on the nature of language.

• Read a complete transcript here.
• This recording is part of an essay called “Craftsmanship,” which is included in the collection The Death of the Moth and Other Essays, available at Amazon.
• The CD collection Spoken Word: British Writers is also available at Amazon.
• If you’re in the mood for more wordplay, check out these two related posts on my blog: “Jump-Start Your Writing with Wordplay” and “Quote of the Week: Eve Merriam.“

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