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How did I end up listening to the recorded voice of Virginia Woolf on my Ipod? It went something like this … eight years ago when Stephanie was eight we went to see the movie, The Hours. We loved it. Eight years later, I remembered Steph loved it and I bought her the DVD. We watched it and as always, I wiki-ed the movie, then the book The Hours, then the book Mrs Dalloway and then Virginia Woolf. Somehow I ended my explorations into Virginia Woolf on Youtube and found this gem!

Once you get over the creepiness of her antiquated voice, this speech by Virginia Woolf on words (or werds!!) is extremely captivating. I listened to it in the dark while going to sleep and it was more than a little creepy. People just don’t speak like that anymore!! I had no idea what she was talking about until I listened to her a second time and then I understood that she was giving a speech about love … the greatest love of her life, the English language!

She has an amazing understanding and respect for the English language and only a great writer who has a true love of werds could give such an intimate and human persona to these little sounds that we so readily take for granted. For Woolf, words are self conscious, they don’t like to be flaunted. She worries about their abuse and commends their democratic nature. She regrets that we deny words their liberty, use them for political objectives, to make money and that is why, Woolf explains, there are no great poets or writers writing at her time. I wonder would she consider things to have changed much now.

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