1. Mary Carmichael: in 1928 Marie Stopes (pioneer of birth control) published a novel entitled Love’s Creation under the name Marie Carmichael.
2. Sir Chartres Biron: Sir Chartres Biron was the magistrate in the obscenity trial, taking place at the time of Woolf’s lectures, of Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness. (See the introduction for discussion of this issue.)
3. Diana of the Crossways: (1885) a novel by George Meredith (1885), often thought of as depicting a ‘modern’ woman.
4. They shared a laboratory together …: the manuscript contains the following passage, showing that Woolf originally intended to allude directly to the trial of The Well of Loneliness. It reads in its unfinished state as follows:
‘Chloe liked Olivia: they shared a –’ the words came at the bottom of the page; the pages had stuck; while fumbling to open them there flashed into my mind the inevitable policeman; the summons; the order to attend the court; the dreary waiting; the Magistrate coming in with little bow; the glass of water; the counsel for the prosecution; for the defense; the verdict; this book is obscene; & flames rising, perhaps on Tower Hill, as they consumed masses of paper. Here the pages came apart. Heaven be praised! It was only a laboratory. Chloe and Olivia. They were engaged in mincing liver which is apparently a cure for pernicious anaemia. (See Women and Fiction, p. 114)
5. Burke or Debrett: reference books about the British aristocracy and gentry. Sir Hawley Butts appears to be imaginary.
6. Sir William Joynson Hicks: the Home Secretary at the time. Woolf knew his name well as she had used it in a letter she and E. M. Forster (novelist and closeted homosexual) had written to the Nation. Protesting at the Home Secretary’s banning of The Well of Loneliness, they had satirized his attempts at literary censorship:
The subject of the book exists as a fact among the many other facts of life … novelists in England have now been forbidden to mention it by Sir W. Joynson Hicks. May they mention it incidentally? Although it is forbidden as a main theme, may it be alluded to, or ascribed to subsidiary characters? Perhaps the Home Secretary will issue further orders on this point.
7. Thrale marries: Samuel Johnson’s close friendship with Mrs Hester Thrale came to an end when she married the musician Gabriel Piozzi.
8. Balaclava … Edward the Seventh: the Battle of Balaclava (Crimean War), 1854; the birth of Edward VII was in 1841.
9. Juvenal … Strindberg: Juvenal (AD 60?-140?) attacked women in his sixth satire; the Swedish playwright and author August Strindberg (1849–1912) was a misogynist.
10. Mr Woodhouse and Mr Casaubon: Mr Woodhouse is the father of Jane Austen’s Emma (1816); Mr Casaubon is in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872).