'Distant voices, still alive' — Virginia Woolf speaks

There is only one surviving recording of the author, just as is the case with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Both — along with those of many other literary greats of the past — are to be found on CD boxed sets released last month by the British Library's sound library, part of "The Spoken Word" series.

Jan Dalley's October 25, 2008 Financial Times column has the back story, and follows.

Distant voices, still alive

Spend a couple of minutes with an internet search engine and you can hear rolling out of your machine the voice of Alfred Lord Tennyson reading "The Charge of the Light Brigade" in 1890. Captured on a wax cylinder that seems to have got a bit squished by time, the wobbly and distorted voice comes down to us as an almost otherworldly chanting, vividly pounding out the dactyls of "half a league, half a league onwards", yet as remote as if it were from another planet.

The year before that, in 1889, Thomas Edison made it possible for us to know what Robert Browning sounded like, excitedly galloping through the rhythms of his verse and shouting out hurrahs. Later that year Browning succumbed to his last illness and so became the first person whose voice was ever heard after his death.

More than a century after the recordings of these eminent Victorians, in a world where television and radio hungrily snatches at every syllable uttered by the famous, we might assume that writers' speaking voices are as easy to find as their printed texts.

But it's not so. Even though Thomas Hardy lived until 1928, we don't know what his voice was like. More strangely, there's no existing recording of George Orwell, even though he lived and worked in the early heyday of broadcasting and made several BBC programmes.

The heights of fame are no proof against audio obscurity. Poets are more likely to have been recorded because they gave readings (until recently, novelists didn't). And there is now the excellent Poetry Archive, which is building up a recording history of English-language poets, available online and on CDs. The impulse behind the archive was the realisation that so many wonderful poets whom we could have heard are now declaiming only to the angels. Prose writers and dramatists may have fared even worse in the ears of posterity. There is only one surviving recording of Virginia Woolf, for instance, only one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, only three of Scott Fitzgerald. But now all these are to be found on a superb pair of CD boxed sets released this week from the British Library's sound archive, in "The Spoken Word" series.

These are the brainchild of the British Library's Richard Fairman, who is also one of the FT's music writers. There's one box for British writers, and one for American. Each has three discs and each disc has many delights and surprises. In a wonderful interview between Ian Fleming and Raymond Chandler, for instance (and by the way this is also the only known recording of the author of "The Big Sleep"), we hear two highly successful but utterly different thrilleristes agree that, in literary terms, they are both "below the salt". Each man is so laid-back it's a transatlantic competition in being laconic. And you can almost feel the crackle in the studio air when the feisty Mary McCarthy takes on her questioner.

There's Nancy Mitford claiming to know nothing about social nuances, and a gravelly, Brooklyn-accented Henry Miller happily agreeing with his interviewer's assertion that people read his books "for the wrong reasons, for the erotic content". Evelyn Waugh reveals that he wanted to be a painter; Gertrude Stein answers a question in a single interminable unpunctuated sentence (it's just like reading her impenetrable prose).

Some sound exactly as you would expect — Rudyard Kipling with vowels so clipped they scarcely exist; Isaac Bashevis Singer exactly the growling, guttural-bass Yiddish-speaker I'd imagined. But I never thought that PG Wodehouse would have retained his full English plumminess through a lifetime spent in America (and who knew that "capitalist" used to be pronounced "ker-pittilist" by the posh?). Or that Scott Fitzgerald would try to make himself sound like Laurence Olivier, here patchily reciting "Othello." Or that Vladimir Nabokov would spout absurd pomposities in an accent so unlikely that it sounds like a Monty Python sketch.

These are, perhaps, rather abstruse pleasures — after all, why should we care what writers sound like? The first time I heard a recording of TS Eliot reading his own poems, I was bitterly disappointed by his dreary monotone delivery, flat and utterly off-putting; by contrast, Ted Hughes had a voice so wonderful he could have made a laundry list sound like an important work of lit, and a wickedly sexy one at that. But both are illusions, in their way — neither man's vocal style changes the value of his lines on the page.

Yet we do care. A writer's "voice" is the term we use for her or his style, the undisputed fingerprint of a talent captured on the page. The ever-growing popularity of literary festivals, where audiences flock to listen to writers whose books they often don't bother to read, suggests that what we really want is a writer to speak to us, in all the senses of that phrase. Well, on these fascinating recordings they do speak to us, and say more than they know. Listen and enjoy — but beware of your illusions, they may prove fragile.

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"British Writers — The Spoken Word (3 CDs + booklet, running time 214 minutes) is £19.95.

"American Writers — The Spoken Word" (3 CDs + booklet, running time 210 minutes) likewise costs £19.95.