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
Aunt Helena is a throwback.
Her main moment in life was when she died.
when she was living in Burma.
So she's an absolutely imperial creature, Burma of the 1870s, and she has a glass eye.
It seemed fitting, writes Wolfe, that she should be turning to glass.
And then when we encounter her at Clarissa's party at the end of the novel, we're told that people who had known Burma in the 1870s, people who had known Burma in the 1870s,
We're always led up to her.
She's sitting in a chair.
She's old and not very able-bodied.
So we have to, again, if we're thinking in this old realist dispensation, so we're thinking not so much Wolfe and more like Dickens.
So how would Dickens do this party?
Or how would Austen do this party?
Well, Woolf has plenty of that spirit in her too.
Here is Aunt Helena in her sort of bath chair, as it were, at the party.
And people are being led up to her.
People who had known Burma in the 1870s being led up to her.
And what she likes to talk about once you encounter Aunt Helena is the book that she wrote about orchids in Burma and how it was praised by Charles Darwin.
At that same party, very glancingly, we see two young, well, we'd call them nowadays Sloanes, basically.
or in American parlance, sort of preppy socialites, Lord Gaten and Nancy Blow.
And we're simply told about Lord Gaten, who's very good with horses, that ponies' mouths quivered at the end of his reins.
Showing 621–640 of 815 · page 32 of 41
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