Zadie Smith: Speaking In Tongues

I have just come across the 2009 Zadie Smith essay in which she considers “personal multiplicity” from Eliza Doolittle and Cary Grant to Barack Obama. To wit: ‘Hello. This voice I speak with these days, this English voice with its rounded vowels and consonants in more or less the right place—this is not the voice of my childhood. I picked it up in college, along with the unabridged Clarissa and a taste for port.’

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