James Wood
speaker
815 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 15 Sep
James Wood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I mean, when I was going through the novel again a couple of days ago, I just wanted to get some of these sort of actualities right.
And I noticed that Anna Morgan, the narrator of Voyage in the Dark, who's working as a chorus girl, is paid 35 bob a week.
That's to say £1.75, I think, a week for
Her rent for a room in, say, Bloomsbury or something, Judd Street, I think, is about 50p a week.
And just to give readers an idea, when she's taken up by Walter, the Jeffreys, the wealthy, we don't really find out what he does, but he's rich enough to live on Green Street.
his first gesture is to slip 25 pounds into an envelope uh for her which he spends on on some which he spends on clothes so that's 175 a week and in a in a stroke she gets many weeks salary uh from one of her her male benefactors you're absolutely right um maybe what we should do before we get to voyage in the dark is just
Remind listeners of how Reese came to be, I mean, how she comes to be in London and Paris, how she took up the job of being a chorus girl for a while, and then this rather precarious existence, which she writes about so brilliantly in one way or another, in which her heroines depend on the...
The largesse in all sorts of ways of men.
She was born far away from England in Dominica.
And maybe Miranda, you would just tell us a little bit about that background and the move in 1907 as a girl to Cambridge, England.
Interesting.
And this is the way in which you can say that the characters and the heroines in the novels
though there's some rebellion and refusal and bolshiness, never actually really break out of the sort of sexual patronage system, playing the rules of the game and so on.
But you can absolutely decisively say that the novels do in the sense that they were written by someone who was greater than that game and was not a victim of that game.
And surely by writing the novels themselves shows that she wasn't.
I think they're...
They're real novels of protest in that sense.
Hello, and welcome to Who's Afraid of Realism, a close readings podcast from the London Review of Books.
My name is James Wood, and our book today is probably the most famous novel by Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925.
Woolf worked on the book roughly between summer 1922 and the summer of 1924.
Showing 501–520 of 815 · page 26 of 41
← Previous
Next →