The Author's Voice.(International Edition; SOCIETY & THE ARTS)(The Spoken Word: British Writers)(Sound recording review)

Byline: Sophie Grove

A newly released series of recordings preserves the speech of British writers from Woolf to Waugh.

We will never know what Shakespeare sounded like when he spoke. He lived, of course, 300 years before the advent of sound recordings. And while it is surely the voice on the page--or the stage--that matters most, there is something irresistible about hearing the cadences and tone, accent and pitch, of our favorite authors. The voice of Arthur Conan Doyle, for instance, has a husky Scottish twang--more akin to Sean Connery than to Doyle's clipped, upper-class character Sherlock Holmes. In the only known recording of his voice, Doyle seems exasperated by his creation, for whom he even fielded marriage proposals. "To many he seems to be a real person," he says. "His autograph, also, is much in demand."

Doyle died just two months after the recording was made in 1930, on the cusp of the audio era. He is just one of the literary greats included on "The Spoken Word: British Writers," a compendium of largely unheard tapes released on compact disc by the British Library and the BBC. The radio broadcasts from the library's vast sound archive bring to life writers from E. M. Forster to Ian Fleming. "Before 1900 there was almost nothing [recorded]," says the British Library's Richard Fairman, who has spent the past 18 months on the project. "At the beginning they didn't archive anything. They didn't see it as something for posterity. The broadcasts were all live. They went out and they were gone."

Early radio was a formal affair, and some of the recordings reflect it. During the 1930s, men on air at the BBC had to don black tie before taking the microphone, and interviews were rare. Instead, authors were asked to prepare and read speeches. Virginia Woolf's musings on language--the only surviving tape of her voice--appear here, spirited but starchy: "Only after the writer is dead do his words to some extent, only to some extent, become disinfected, purified of the accidents of the living body," she says.

To the modern ear the vintage style can sound stilted and a bit disappointing. James Bond's creator, Ian Fleming, is distant and short; he claims the only reason he started writing novels is because he failed at almost every other profession. His interviewer's questions hardly ...