a. Lysistrata: in the play by Aristophanes Lysistrata argued that women should refuse sexual relations with men as a strategy to pressurize them to end war.
b. Edward VIII upon his abdication: King Edward VIII abdicated in 1936 in order to marry Mrs Wallis Simpson, who was not eligible to become queen nor morganatic consort as she had already been married and divorced (twice). In a speech broadcast on radio he said that he could not face his high office ‘without the help and support of the woman I love’. Woolf was very interested in the politics of the abdication, which was the outcome of a constitutional crisis, and refers to it several times in her diaries and letters.
c. Clare College … a private bequest: Woolf’s treatment of the issues raised by the conjunction of these two pieces in the Nation is very light compared with her more unguarded first response. In the text of her speech to the Women’s Service League she cites the Keynes review in the context of her anger that Clare College had spent so much money on a book. Had the book been sent to her for review, she continued, she would have written very differently.
O you old humbugs. I should have begun. O you who have enjoyed for all these centuries comfort and prosperity – O you who profess devotion to the lady of Clare and love for the Sentiment of colleges, would it not be better to spend your six thousand pounds not upon a book, clothed in the finest dress of paper and buckram, but upon a girl, whose dress allowance is very meagre, and who tries to do her work, as you will read if you turn the very next page in the Nation, in one cold gloomy ground floor bedroom which faces due north and is overrun with mice. (Somerville it seems is very hard up.) (‘Speech of 21 January 1931’, reprinted in The Pargiters, p. xxxiv).
Woolf’s remarks are slightly confusing, as Somerville is a women’s college at Oxford. The Nation and Athenaeum was a liberal magazine, with which the Woolfs were associated; it was subsequently incorporated into the New Statesman.
d. Whitaker: Woolf refers to the reference book, Whitaker’s Almanac, which she used when compiling the data for TG.
e. vain and vicious: Woolf’s argument has found recent scholarly support. See, for example, Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (Sage, 1977), where it is argued that conventions such as the lecture form are designed to occlude the imposition of arbitrary authority and legitimate symbolic violence.
f. Married Women’s Property Act in 1870: strictly speaking, Woolf is wrong here about property. The right of married women to keep their own earnings, only, was secured in 1870 (the full property bill having been truncated in the House of Lords), and it was not until 1882 that it was extended to cover wealth as well as income.