Chapter V
1 (p. 56) “With how sad steps she climbs the sky, /How silently and with how wan a face”: Rodney is slightly misquoting this line from Sonnet 31 of English poet Sir Philip Sidney’s sequence Astrophel and Stella (1591); the first line should read, “With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb‘st the skies!”
Chapter VI
1 (p. 67) she made her way across Lincoln’s Inn Fields . . . until she reached her office in Russell Square: Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the largest of London’s squares, was designed in part by the renowned English architect Inigo Jones (1573-1652); located in the City of London near the Royal Courts of Justice and the four Inns of Court, it is the site of lawyers’ offices. Russell Square, the largest square in the Bloomsbury section of London, is near the British Museum and the University of London.
2 (p. 71) the British Museum . . . Elgin marbles . . . the Ulysses: London’s British Museum houses the Elgin marbles, a collection of ancient Greek sculptures that once adorned the Parthenon, the famed temple to Athena in Athens. The collection, which includes the frieze and parts of the pediment of the Parthenon, was brought to England in the first decade of the nineteenth century by Thomas Bruce, seventh earl of Elgin, and sold to the British government in 1816; one of the sculptures is a head wearing a sailor’s cap, thought to represent Ulysses.
3 (p. 71) another gallery devoted to engraved obelisks and winged Assyrian bulls: The museum contains several examples of obelisks, four-sided, tapering, usually monolithic pillars that terminate in a pyramid. The Assyrian bulls are a pair of huge winged stone bulls with human heads that once guarded the gates to the citadel of the Assyrian king Sargon II (721-705 B.C.), in what is today the village of Khorsabad, Iraq.
4 (p. 74) “Salford’s affiliated”: Clacton means that the Salford society for suffrage reform has joined the larger fictional society for general suffrage. Salford is an industrial city near Manchester in northwestern England.
5 (p. 74) “Partridge’s last speech? ... the best thing they’ve had in the House this Session”: Partridge is a fictitious member of Parliament and a supporter of suffrage in the House of Commons.
6 (p. 79) “that verse from the Psalms . . . about the sowers and the seed”: Rather than Psalms, Sally seems to be thinking of the biblical Parable of the Sower and the Seed (Luke 8:5-8): “A sower went out to sow his seed: and as he sowed, some fell by the way side; and it was trodden down, and the fowls of the air devoured it. And some fell upon a rock; and as soon as it was sprung up, it withered away, because it lacked moisture. And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprang up with it, and choked it. And other fell on good ground, and sprang up, and bare fruit an hundredfold.”
7 (p. 81) enchanted people in a bewitched tower, with the spiders’ webs looping across the corners of the room: The passage is possibly an echo of English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s 1832 poem “The Lady of Shalott”: “There she weaves by night and day / A magic web with colours gay.”
Chapter VII
1 (p. 84) “ ‘It’s the younger generation knocking at the door’ ”: This is an allusion to a line from Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen’s 1892 play The Master Builder. “Presently the younger generation will come knock at my door.”
2 (p. 86) “the name of the lady Hamlet was in love with”: Mrs. Hilbery is referring to Ophelia, in Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet.
3 (p. 90) the Hilberys subscribed to a library: Lending libraries were extremely popular in England.
Chapter VIII
1 (p. 94) Mr. Hilbery’s study . . . Shelley . . . Byron . . . Keats’s: Mr. Hilbery is studying the lives of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron, 1788-1824), and John Keats (1795-1821), all English romantic poets.
2 (p. 94) whether Coleridge had wished to marry Dorothy Wordsworth: The close friendship between English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), English poet William Wordsworth (1770- 1850), and William’s sister Dorothy (1771-1855), a prose writer known for her diaries and recollections, is well documented.
3 (p. 95) “Ibsen and Butler . . . He has sent me a letter full of quotations— nonsense, though clever nonsense”: Cyril is apparently defending his decision not to marry by quoting Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) and English novelist Samuel Butler (1835-1902); both attacked the bourgeois values of nineteenth-century society and presented new models of gender and family.
Chapter IX
1 (p. 102) “I can see them now, sweeping over the lawns at Melbury House”: Mrs. Hilbery recalls an actual event—the artistic garden parties at Little Holland House (in what is today Melbury Road) held by Woolf’s great aunt Mrs. Sara Prinsep, who lived there from 1850 to 1871. Woolf’s mother often attended them, and it was here that Woolf’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen, met the daughters of English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), Minny (who would become his first wife) and Anny.
2 (p. 104) “off we went for a day’s pleasuring—Richmond, Hampton Court, the Surrey Hills”: Richmond upon Thames is a borough of London known for its domestic architecture and large green. Nearby Hampton Court Palace, about which Woolf wrote a short essay in 1903, is the former home of Henry VIII and other kings and queens of England. Immediately south of London, the district of Surrey is a hilly, rural area frequented by day-trippers from London.
3 (p. 105) “I went to his rooms, when I knew he was engaged at the poor men’s college.... an address in Seton Street, off the Kennington Road”: Seton Street is fictitious, but Kennington Road runs through a poor district of south London. Like Cyril, Woolf also taught at a college for the working class, Morley College in south London, from 1905 to 1907.
