a. Mary Kingsley is not speaking for herself alone: Mary Kingsley (1862–1900) was an explorer and travel writer. Woolf was very conscious of her own lack of a formal education. See, for example, her essay ‘On Not Knowing Greek’ in WE, pp. 93–106.
b. the Pastons to the Pendennises: Woolf had written an essay on ‘The Pastons and Chaucer’, published in the first series of The Common Reader; Pendennis is a novel by Thackeray (The History of Pendennis, 1848–50); the accumulation of Arthur’s Education Fund, logged in John Pendennis’s accounts as ‘A.E.F’, is described in chapter xviii.
c. K.C.: King’s Counsel (in modern British parlance therefore QC), a title given to eminent barristers and also referred to in the profession as ‘taking silk’ (i.e. having the right to wear a silk gown). Woolf is clarifying that her addressee is a lawyer.
d. the year 1919: in 1919 the professions in Britain were opened to women through the passing of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act.
e. European war: the First World War.
f. Scarborough Conference … of working men: refers to the locations of the Conservative and Labour party annual conferences of 1937.
g. photographs … Spanish Government: the Spanish Civil War (1936–9) was a conflict between supporters and opponents of the socialist Spanish republic, founded in 1931. The Republicans (then in government) were aided by the USSR and the International Brigades; Woolf’s nephew Julian Bell volunteered as an ambulance driver and was killed there in 1937, aged twenty-nine. (TG can be read as a painful argument between Woolf and Julian Bell – see introduction for discussion.) The ‘Nationalist’ insurgents, led by Franco and supported by fascist Italy and Germany, won the war. Virginia and Leonard Woolf were among liberals supporting the republican cause: in June 1937, for example, they joined other notable figures on the platform at an Albert Hall meeting organized by the National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief. Woolf’s diary note was typical: ‘To the Albert Hall meeting last night. The last I swear … All very stagey empty and unreal’ (Diary, V, pp. 98–9). The photographs themselves do not appear in TG (and do not appear to have survived in the Woolf archives). Woolf received them on 14 November 1936 according to a letter written to Julian Bell at the time (Letters, VI, p. 85). Presumably they were sent by the republican government to sympathizers abroad, for purposes of political persuasion and raising financial support.
h. one guinea: a guinea was worth 21/- (twenty-one shillings), the current UK sterling equivalent being £1.05 (not adjusted for inflation).
i. as before in France: Woolf refers again to the First World War.
j. our position is still … of the slightest: later in the text Woolf elaborates this argument. Since 1938 the position of women in the professions in Britain has changed. As of 1992, it is as follows: the Army and Navy do not accept women as combatants, only in supporting roles; the first woman member of the Stock Exchange has been admitted recently; the established church has approved the ordination of women priests, since 1992; the press is entirely owned and almost entirely controlled by men; the civil service is very sharply segregated, less than 10 per cent of ‘career grade’ employees are women; an increasing proportion of qualifying barristers are women, but there are very few women in the judiciary.
k. Mrs Carlyle: Jane Baillie Welsh Carlyle (1801–66), noted for her astringency and shrewd wit. Woolf is probably referring to her letters, a new collection of which had been published in 1931. The many names referred to in this paragraph are well-known hostesses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Duchess of Devonshire–Lady Ashburton), male politicians (Pitt–Gladstone), male writers (Sheridan–Carlyle) and female writers (Jane Austen–George Eliot).
l. the franchise: universal female suffrage had been won in 1929, and the vote for women over thirty (the male age was twenty-one) in 1918 in Britain. The suffrage movement had been divided over the use of militancy, constitutionalists being called suffragists and only the more violent Women’s Social and Political Union being known as suffragettes. Woolf had a period of activism in support of this cause, circa 1910. In TG she uses the authoritative work by Ray Strachey, The Cause: A Short History of the Women’s Movement in Great Britain (1928; still in print in 1992) as a source.
m. prostitutes … under the lamps of Piccadilly Circus: known at that time as a base for London prostitutes. Woolf’s argument here is reminiscent of the view of Friedrich Engels, that the middle-class financially dependent wife differed from the common courtesan only in so far as she did not sell her body at piecework rates but ‘once and for all’ in marriage (Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 1884). In Mrs Dalloway ‘those poor girls in Piccadilly’ are invoked in an outburst against the hypocrisies of the middle-class, patriarchal family (1925; Penguin Books, 1992, p. 80).
n. an Act which unbarred the professions: see Note d.
o. sixpence: currently equivalent to 2½.
p. first brief: first commission for a barrister. They are briefed by solicitors, traditionally by means of a parchment document tied with red ribbon.
q. St Paul: St Paul had said that women should cover their heads when praying or prophesying: ‘… for a man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man’ (1 Cor., 11: 7).
r. your finest clothes are those that you wear as soldiers: Woolf took press, cuttings on the subject of soldiers’ dress; see the example ‘New Uniforms for Army’ in Appendix I.
s. we can refuse all such distinctions: Woolf herself refused honorary degrees from universities and one of the state’s highest honours, the Companion of Honour (see introduction for discussion).
t. money with which to rebuild a women’s college: Woolf had received a letter in 1936 from Pernel Strachey, then Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, asking her to act as a patron of the college and assist their appeal for building funds.
u. an outsider: note Woolf’s use of this term, which is built up as the argument progresses.
v. the English tripos: the Cambridge term for degree examinations.