Listen to the original British Library archive recordings:

Arthur Miller Sir Arthur Conan Doyle F.Scott Fitzgerald John Steinbeck Virginia Woolf

To hear Florence Nightingale pronounce her own name with such precise, emphatic enunciation — “Florence [dramatic pause] Nightingale” — takes you straight into her living presence and tells you in an instant what a powerfully self-possessed character she must have been. The speech she is giving, In Aid of the Light Brigade Relief Fund, recorded in 1890, is just one among the British Library’s unrivalled sound archives, running to a mind-boggling 1m discs and 200,000 tapes. The library has released two new three-CD sets, one of British and one of American writers, talking about life, literature and their work. They include EM Forster, Evelyn Waugh, Harold Pinter, Tennessee Williams, F Scott Fitzgerald, and a whisky-sozzled Raymond Chandler talking to Ian Fleming, and breaking into frequent snuffly giggles.

What is so enjoyable about the collection is its capacity to surprise. It includes the only known recording of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, talking a little about Holmes but much more about his great passion, spiritualism. Subconsciously, I had expected him to sound something like Basil Rathbone, but, of course, he was, as his strong accent unmistakably reminds us, Scottish.

In generous excerpts averaging a good 10 minutes or so, the various writers are fascinating, partly for what they say, but perhaps more for the way they say it. There’s Anthony Burgess discussing A Clockwork Orange; Arthur Miller on his porch in Connecticut, April birdsong filling the air, talking about what it was like to be married to Marilyn Monroe (not bad, apparently); and Joe Orton observing that a playwright’s career is “very short” — a week before he was murdered.

JRR Tolkien, interviewed in the Randolph Hotel in Oxford, has an amiably wheezy, pipe-smoking laugh, and is not nearly so much the old curmudgeon you might imagine. He talks like a rambling but enthusiastic old don, in overlapping half-sentences, stopping to add incoherent footnotes to his observations and going off at unexpected tangents with such breakneck speed, they threaten to give you aural whiplash. The underlying melancholy of the man, and his profound nostalgia and dislike of the modern world are evident, too; for instance, when he casually observes that the world of his boyhood, rural Warwickshire in the 1890s, was far closer to the England of Shakespeare than to the England of “today”, 1965. A remarkable thought, but probably true.

The accents of the poshest writers sound the strangest to our egalitarian ears. Rebecca West talks of her “gelhood” and admires this new play called Look Back in Enger, while Forster frets about how we are going to “menage the chellenge” of the modern world. Baroness Orczy talks about her famous creation, The Scarlet Pimpern-el, with the emphasis quaintly on the last syllable, a pronunciation somehow intensely redolent of a vanished world. And one has to admire Noël Coward, caught at 6am at Heathrow on his way from his home in Jamaica to Switzerland, and managing to be perfectly sprightly and witty even at that hour, after (presumably) a lengthy flight.

Of the voice of Virginia Woolf, the sleeve notes say: “Who would have believed that this is how the writer sounded?” Actually, this is exactly how I would expect her to sound: the perfect voice in which to express one’s horror at how frightfully the lower classes smell. We all have preconceived ideas, and having them confirmed or challenged is part of the fun of these recordings. Unfortunately, only a few female writers are represented, since the best of them — Jane Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot — lived before the advent of voice recording. There have been no George Eliots since the rise of feminism.

Among the Americans, there is a very lively octogenarian Henry Miller, complaining that people have too much sex nowadays, “as though they were doing exercises”, and ending every other sentence with a thick New York “Doncha know?”. There’s one of only three surviving snippets of F Scott Fitzgerald. Here, he recites from Othello, his voice deep and his delivery quite beautiful. He died a year after the recording, at 44. And there’s Gore Vidal, with his patrician drawl and frequent use of the word “somewhat”, praising his own work highly, censuring most others, taking yet another pop at Norman Mailer and asserting: “Anyone interested in literature has got to be conservative.”

Most extraordinary by a long verst is Vladimir Nabokov, sounding part Welsh, part Bela Lugosi. In answer to a simple question on how he writes, he laments “the pencil that must be sharpened, the bladder that must be drained”. He recalls a former editor to whom he used to send “indignatory quests” for his advances. Indignatory quests? Is this English? No, it’s Nabokovian. Evidently, he spoke it as well as wrote it. When he alludes to “that morphic and limp creature known as the general reader”, this is Nabokov speaking naturally. You would never get bored listening to him; at least, not before he got bored with talking to us, morphic and limp creatures that we are, and stalked off to catch butterflies.

The first sound recordings were made possible as early as 1877, when Thomas Edison invented the cylinder phonograph, so we missed hearing Dickens by only seven years. A tantalising thought. We could also theoretically have recordings of George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Emily Dickinson — though she’d say no to all interviews, wouldn’t she? We could even have had Byron if he had lived till he was 90, which was admittedly never very likely. Going even further back, some experts say Shakespeare would sound to us today like a Yorkshireman — or, even worse, an American. Chaucer would be fun to hear, though there are good recordings available of scholars reading The Canterbury Tales as it would have sounded in 1400.

As it is, there are many regrettable gaps. We have no recordings of the voice of Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Beatrix Potter, DH Lawrence or Henry James, although all lived well into the Edison era. The one supposed recording of Oscar Wilde has sadly proved to be a fake. Even worse, though Orwell was employed by the BBC until 1943 and made numerous broadcasts, not one is known to have survived. What was the BBC doing? Too busy paying its ghastly presenters vast sums of our money to make obscene phone calls to elderly gentlemen, presumably.

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