ENDNOTES
1 (p. 6) Lars Porsena of Clusium /... Should suffer wrong no more: These are the opening lines of “Horatius,” by English writer Thomas Babington Macaulay; it is one of the most famous poems in his work Lays of Ancient Rome (1842). Macaulay was a favorite of both Virginia Woolf and her father, Sir Leslie Stephen.
2 (p. 8) London County Council for Night Schools: Woolf taught literature and history at one such school, Morley College, an institute for workingmen and -women, from 1905 to 1907.
3 (p. 9) she gazed at the ship they were approaching; ... they could dimly read her name — Euphrosyne: The name of the ship plays off several references. In Greek mythology, Euphrosyne is one of the three Graces, daughters of Zeus who were personifications of beauty, charm, and grace. Euphrosyne is also the name of a fifth-century saint whose life story is told in the Vitae Patrum; because Euphrosyne had promised to dedicate her life to God, when her rich father promised her hand in marriage to a wealthy youth she disguised herself as a man and entered a monastery to preserve her celibacy. Finally, Euphrosyne is the title of a collection of poems published privately in 1905 by Woolf’s Bloomsbury friends, among them Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, and Leonard Woolf; Virginia wrote a severe criticism of the collection in an unpublished essay.
4 (p. 18) “Poor little goats!”: In earlier drafts of the novel — one has been reconstructed by Louise DeSalvo and published under the title Melymbrosia — it is stated that Willoughby’s ships transport goats. In the final draft Woolf excised that information but left in this remark. This may also be an allusion to Woolf’s family nickname, “Goat.”
5 (p. 38) “the whole agitation”: The reference is to the women’s suffrage movement, which is referred to throughout the novel, with several male characters repeatedly questioning its purpose. Woolf herself volunteered in the movement in 1910 at the urging of her Greek tutor, Janet Case, by helping to address envelopes. After an intense campaign, in 1918 the vote was granted in Britain to women of property over the age of thirty; in 1928 women were granted voting rights equal to those of men.
6 (p. 39) “But whenever I hear of Shelley I repeat to myself the words of Matthew Arnold, ‘What a set! What a set!’”: Richard is quoting from an essay on Shelley by English poet and critic Matthew Arnold (1822-1888): “What a set! What a world! Is the exclamation that breaks from us as we come to an end of this history of ‘the occurrence of Shelley’s private life’” (Essays in Criticism, Second Series, 1888, reprinted 1911, p. 237).
7 (p. 40) “I shall never forget the Antigone”: Woolf greatly admired this tragedy by Greek dramatist Sophocles (c.496-406 B.C.) for its portrayal of women’s difficulties in society, and she referred to it frequently. The play focuses on Antigone’s struggle to give her brother a proper burial after King Creon has ordered that his body remain unburied. The King punishes Antigone for her efforts by decreeing that she be buried alive, but before he can enforce the decree she commits suicide. Woolf was tutored in both Latin and Greek and read most of the classics in their original languages.
8 (p. 40) “It seemed to me I’d known twenty Clytemnestras”: In an earlier draft of The Voyage Out, Mrs. Dalloway had seen not Antigone but Agamemnon, a tragedy by another Greek dramatist, Aeschylus (525-456 B.C.). This reference to Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife, survives the revision.
9 (p. 40) πoλλ ...π oδµασ [Greek passage]: The quotation is from Sophocles’ Antigone (scene 1, the first ode by the Chorus). A translation by Robert Fitzgerald and Dudley Fitts (The Oedipus Cycle, New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949) reads:
Numberless are the world’s wonders, but none

More wonderful than man; the stormgray sea

Yields to his prows, the huge crests bear him high;

Earth, holy and inexhaustible, is graven

With shining furrows where his plows have gone

Year after year, the timeless labor of stallions.
10 (p. 50) Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and Henry George: Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895), Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), and Henry George (1839-1897) were radical thinkers of Woolf’s era: Huxley, an English biologist, supported Darwinism and also coined the term agnosticism to describe his philosophy. Spencer, an English philosopher, also supported Darwin’s theory of evolution. George was an American sociologist and economist.
11 (p. 52) “Here lies the duck that Samuel Johnson sat on, eh?”: Richard Dalloway is thinking of a poem attributed to English writer and critic Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), one version of which reads as follows: “Here lies poor duck / That Samuel Johnson trod on” (The Poems of Samuel Johnson, edited by David Nichol Smith and Edward L. McAdam, second edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974, pp. 460-461).
12 (p. 57) Persuasion: In this last novel of English author Jane Austen (1775-1817), Anne Elliot is saved from her spinster life and her overbearing relatives when she has a second chance at marriage with her first love. Woolf’s The Common Reader includes an insightful essay on Austen.
13 (p. 69) “‘Good, then, is indefinable’”: The quotation is from Principia Ethica (1903), by Cambridge professor and philosopher George Edward Moore. Moore was a member of the Cambridge Conversazione Society, a discussion society at Cambridge also known as the “Apostles”; he had an enormous influence on many Cambridge-educated members of Bloomsbury, including Thoby Stephen, Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster, and Maynard Keynes.
14 (p. 84) three hundred years ago five Elizabethan barques had anchored where the Euphrosyne now floated: Here Woolf is drawing on the history of Brazil to create an imaginary history for her fictional town of Santa Marina. In the fifteenth century both Spain and Portugal claimed Brazil, but it was Portugal that dominated the country for almost 400 years (except for the period 1580-1640, known as the “Spanish Captivity,” when Spain was the primary power over both Portugal and its colonies). During this time English adventurers repeatedly attacked Brazil’s shores; thus Woolf’s description of “five Elizabethan barques” anchored in Santa Marina several hundred years ago.
15 (p. 89) “If you all die of typhoid I won’t be responsible!”: Woolf’s brother Thoby died at the age of twenty-six of typhoid fever, which he contracted during a trip to Greece with Virginia, Vanessa, and Adrian Stephen. The trip was cut short when Vanessa fell ill with appendicitis, and after their return to London, Thoby became sick; Vanessa recovered, but Thoby did not. Woolf’s anguishing experience nursing sick loved ones is movingly reflected in the end of the novel.
16 (p. 177) “And there we lived ... It was Maurice Fielding, of course, that your mother was engaged to,” said Helen’s voice: Helen is apparently reading from a fictional memoir by a sibling of Maurice Fielding, a suitor of Rachel’s mother, Theresa Vinrace.
17 (p. 191) “‘Be good, sweet maid’... Mr. Kingsley”: St. John is quoting from the poem “A Farewell to C. E. G.,” by English clergyman and writer Charles Kingsley (1819-1875). The line continues: “Be good, sweet maid, and let who can be clever.”
18 (pp. 206-207) “I’ve often walked along the streets.... I mean — how does it all strike you?”: Terence’s feminist-leaning speech anticipates many of the arguments Woolf made in two speeches on the subject of women and fiction to a women’s college at Cambridge in 1928. Her speeches were later revised and published as A Room of One’s Own. In this polemic Woolf asserts that the obstacles facing women are both social and economic and that the key to their liberation is independence in the form of a room of their own and a private income of 500 pounds a year.
19 (p. 224) “Sappho.... The one Swinburne did”... Ode to Aphrodite: It is not clear which poem Woolf is referring to here since there is no poem translated by Swinburne titled “Ode to Aphrodite.” However, in her book Virginia Woolf: Becoming a Writer, Katherine Dalsimer asserts that Woolf is referring to Swinburne’s translation of the poem “Sapphics,” which is the only poem he translated that mentions Aphrodite. In this poem Sappho rejects Aphrodite’s offers of male lovers, instead accepting the love of lesbian women.
20 (p. 242) “the Saturday Club”: Woolf appears to be lightly satirizing herself and the social circle she moved in, known as the Bloomsbury group (see the Introduction, p. xviii). Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell started a discussion club in 1905 called “the Friday club,” which Woolf and other members of Bloomsbury attended until it broke up in 1912.
21 (p. 261) “Whoever you are ... be useless”: The lines are a near-quotation from a poem in American poet Walt Whitman’s cycle Leaves of Grass. The poem, “Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand,” comes from a section added to the third edition (1860-1861) and can be interpreted as a celebration of homosexual love.
22 (pp. 276-277) Both were flushed ... who they were: This passage is perhaps one of the most discussed in the novel, because of both its opaque meaning and its strange, jarring sensuality. While in the published version the scene has a dreamy tone and it is hard to understand what is happening between Rachel and Helen, in earlier versions of the novel it is less ambiguous and includes a very forceful interaction between the women: Helen pursues Rachel aggressively, knocking her down, stuffing leaves and seeds into her mouth, and pinning her to the ground; the scene has an openly erotic nature and plays upon the domination of one woman over another. However, Woolf chose to tone down this passage and other more overt allusions to homosexuality in the novel, particularly in the character of St. John Hirst. Throughout her own life Woolf formed strong, intimate relationships with women, from her adolescent friendship with Violet Dickinson to her intense and physical relationship with the writer Vita Sackville-West.
23 (p. 284) “‘Every woman not so much a rake at heart, as an optimist, because they don’t think’”: This is an allusion to English poet Alexander Pope’s 1735 epistle “To a Lady: Of the Characters of Women” (lines 215-216). The original reads: “Men, some to Business, some to pleasure take; / But ev‘ry Woman is at heart a Rake.”
24 (p. 289) “‘Love in the Valley”’: This is the title of a poem by English writer George Meredith (1828-1909). Woolf’s half brother George Duckworth memorized the poem to propose to Lady Flora Russell; she initially accepted him but later changed her mind.
25 (p. 294) “Is it true ... that women die with bugs crawling across their faces?”: The apparent non sequitur here makes sense in the context of an earlier version of The Voyage Out, in which Woolf relates the plot of the novel Rachel is reading. The novel is about an impoverished young woman who resorts to prostitution and dies an ugly death with bugs on her face. Although this explicit reference to a prostitute was removed in the final version of the novel, several others remain, including when Rachel and Helen discuss Richard Dalloway’s kiss and what men want from women (p. 76), when Terence and Rachel discuss her shielded upbringing (p. 208), when Evelyn tells Rachel of her plan to reform prostitutes (p. 242), and later when St. John relates how the hotel has fired one of its female workers who apparently had been discovered visiting rooms at night (p. 299).
26 (p. 317) Terence was reading Milton aloud: Terence goes on to read from the masque Comus (lines 824-828 and 859-866), by English poet John Milton (1608-1674); in this section the lady is trapped and her virtue endangered by Comus, but she is rescued by the water nymph Sabrina. While she was working on the novel, Woolf played Sabrina in the Bloomsbury play-reading society her brother-in-law Clive Bell started in 1907. (See the Introduction, p. xxvii, for more on Comus’s relevance.)
27 (p. 319) Rachel went to bed... she certainly had a headache: Rachel’s initial symptoms resemble Woolf’s symptoms at the onset of her breakdowns, including throbbing in the head, flashing black spots in front of the eyes, a racing pulse, and delusions. During one breakdown Woolf imagined her nurses as fiends, similar to Rachel’s hallucination on page 322.
28 (p. 332) They quarreled about a road, the Portsmouth Road: In his biography of Woolf, Quentin Bell relates how, during the Stephen siblings’ ill-fated expedition to Greece, Thoby and Adrian argued about whether a road was macadamized while Vanessa lay sick and prostrate in the hotel room (Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography, vol. 1, p. 109).
29 (p. 341) Peor and Baalim / ... And mooned Astaroth — : The lines are from Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (lines 197-200), a poem Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, recited each year on Christmas Eve.