Sadly, many things failed Virginia Woolf, but what very rarely did, were words.
Reminded by hearing Gillian Anderson’s recitation of Virginia Woolf’s suicide note, and remembering that from Juliet Stevenson, I want to record here the only surviving recording of Woolf’s voice. Recorded on this day in 1937 for a BBC program entitled “Words Fail Me”, listening to the surviving segment through all the noise and crackle of years gone by, one can still discern the so-admired and oft commented upon sonorous quality of her voice.
The radio essay was adapted to the written form as “Craftsmanship”; collected by Leonard in the posthumous volume The Death of the Moth and other Essays (1942). There, I notice that her essay is dated as 20th April, 1937, so perhaps she wrote it up cleanly the week before, or her dating (or Leonard’s) went awry. One can presume the BBC is correct.
This and other anomalies surrounding this and other recordings and transcripts are written about here by S.N. Clarke from the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain.