Finding a Voice

Abstract

Unlike most of her family who were hearty singers, Stead records that she herself had a weak speaking voice that forced her to turn from the classroom to the correspondence course in her work as a teacher. As a writer too, her voice is muted. Whereas many writers stamp their work with the unmistakeable quality of their own articulation, Stead’s stamp is the flexibility with which she allows her characters to speak through her. She wrote not so much to impose her vision as to release the voices she heard clamouring to be spoken in the world around her. For her, writing was an act of attention first of all, of listening, then enabling other voices to speak through her and attempting to understand them.