Virginia Woolf is one of the most celebrated and intriguing writers of the 20th century. Her highly innovative works are the pinnacle of modernism, focusing inwards on subjectivity and the self, as well as exploring important contemporary issues such as gender, class and war. This recording of her voice is the only one in existence, and was made on 19th April 1937 as part of a BBC documentary called Words Fail Me, when Woolf was fifty-five years old. She lived a life plagued by mental illness and bipolar disorder, and committed suicide by drowning herself less than four years after it was made.
In this fascinating broadcast, entitled Craftsmanship, Woolf argues that words possess endless potential for meaning, and are ‘the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most un-teachable of all things.’ She argues that attempts to codify words or restrain them by rules of grammar are futile – words do not live in dictionaries, but, as she repeats twice in this short extract, ‘they live in the mind.’ This idea is central to Woolf’s work and its constant attempts to stretch the boundaries of what language and writing can achieve. She speaks clearly and with the perfect elocution of the upper-class 1930s Englishwoman, the confidence and polish of her voice belying the underlying anxiety with which she struggled throughout her lifetime.
