1. Odtaa: the Girton Odtaa took its name from John Masefield’s 1926 novel Odtaa (‘one damn thing after another’).
2. Fernham: Woolf has amalgamated Girton and Newnham Colleges, Cambridge.
3. Mary Beton … Mary Carmichael: Woolf alludes to the well-known ‘Ballad of Mary Hamilton’ (‘There was Mary Beaton and Mary Seaton/Mary Carmichael and me’), taken to refer to the companions of the ill-fated Mary, Queen of Scots. Later in AROO these names appear again, attached to the Principal of the college, an aunt of the writer, a young novelist and so on.
4. into the stream: this fishing metaphor is employed in Woolf’s essay ‘Professions for Women’ (reprinted in Appendix II), where it is used to show how female creativity can be hampered by the conventions barring women from writing honestly about their sexual experiences.
5. a Beadle: a university official.
6. the name escapes me: Charles Lamb (1775–1834); the essay is ‘Oxford in the Vacation’, first published in the London Magazine, 1820. Lamb’s disillusion over the manuscript is described in a footnote.
7. this famous library: the manuscript of John Milton’s poem Lycidas is in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge; Woolf’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen, had given the manuscript of Thackeray’s Esmond to the same library.
8. cap and gown … tufts of fur: academic dress at Cambridge includes mortarboards (hats), gowns and hoods edged with rabbit fur.
9. like a sailing-ship: Woolf is presumably referring to the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge.
10. lunch on this occasion: this celebrated description of lunch was thought to be much elaborated for artistic purposes. Leonard and Virginia Woolf did, however, have lunch in George Ryland’s rooms in King’s College (with Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey) on 21 October 1928.
11. We are all going to … the company: ‘We are all going to heaven and Vandyck is of the company’, were supposedly the last words of the painter Thomas Gainsborough (1727–88).
12. before the war: this is the first reference to the First World War in AROO. Woolf was intensely affected by it and became preoccupied with how to prevent war – a central theme of TG. See discussion in the introduction.
13. There … ‘I wait’: Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–92), Maud, Part 1, XXII, x.
14. My heart … is come to me: the opening stanzas of Christina Rossetti’s (1830–94) best-known poem ‘A Birthday’. Both these verses were reprinted in The Oxford Book of English Verse (1912).
15. J—H—herself: Jane Harrison (1850–1928), cultural anthropologist, classical scholar and popularizer of Freudian psychoanalysis, and much admired by Woolf, had died in April 1928.
16. John Stuart Mill: (1806–73) English philosopher, economist and early feminist, the author of The Subjection of Women (1869).
17. a penny of her own: Woolf refers to the passing of the Married Women’s Property Acts in 1870 and 1882, which enabled married women to keep their own earnings.
18. Balliol or King’s: Balliol College, Oxford, and King’s College, Cambridge.