1. Coleridge: Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), poet and essayist. See Table Talk, 1 Sept. 1832.
2. Miss Clough and Miss Davies: campaigners for women’s education who became, respectively, principal of Newnham College and mistress of Girton College, Cambridge.
3. old Jolyon’s head: the dynastic head in John Galsworthy’s novel sequence The Forsyte Saga.
4. an age to come of … self-assertive virility: See Three Guineas for elaboration of this point
5. Atropos: one of the three fates in Greek mythology, she cut the thread of human life with her shears.
6. Lady Murasaki: Japanese novelist (978?–1015?) whose Tale of Genji was currently being translated by Arthur Waley.
7. Sir Archibald Bodkin: the Director of Public Prosecutions at the time, and thus involved in the trial of The Well of Loneliness. This is the third such reference, following on from the presiding magistrate, Sir Chartres Biron, and the Home Secretary, Sir William Joynson-Hicks (see Notes 2 and 6, chapter V).
8. Mr John Langdon Davies … altogether necessary: Woolf has exaggerated a little. The quotation should actually read: ‘And if children cease to be altogether desirable, women cease to be altogether necessary.’
9. Milton’s bogey: cf. Note 6, chapter III. Woolf appears to be referring back to the passage on p. 35, where, walking home from the British Museum, she evokes a sequence of patriarchal London sights with military connotations (Whitehall, Admiralty Arch and so on). At that point, as now, she preferred a view of the open sky to the large figure of a gentleman (probably metaphorical – the text is not clear) that Milton had ‘recommended for my perpetual adoration.’