One last draft footnote

31:9 Princess Mary Princess Mary (1897-1965) was the third child and only daughter of George V and Queen Mary. She married Viscount Henry Lascelles (1882-1947) on February 28, 1922. Lascelles had been an early suitor of Vita Sackville-West and would be the model for the Archduke Harry in O. Michael North notes that, for many people in England, this royal wedding was a sign that the war was finally over (5). Woolf took a passing interest in the wedding ‘Please tell me why Pr. Mary married Ld. Lascelles’ (L2 511). Later Clarissa's maid Lucy imagines herself as attending Princess Mary (59). 

Happy Birthday, Miss Jan

Adeline Virginia Stephen, later Virginia Woolf, was born on this day in 1882. One of her family nicknames was Miss Jan, on account of her January birthday. In the Monday 21^st December [1891] issue of the Hyde Park Gate News, young Virginia, nearly 10, this fictional love letters, part of a regular series in the HPGN:

My own Tom I love you with that fervent passion with which my father regards Roast beef but I do not look upon you with the same eyes as my father for he likes Roast Beef for its tast [sic] but I like you for your personal merits.

Happy Birthday, Miss Jan!

Draft footnote of the day: the green dress

58:14-15 By artificial light the green shone The green dress that becomes magical by artificial light reverses a distressing memory of a green dress gone wrong: ‘Down I came one winter’s evening about 1900 in my green dress […] All the lights were turned up in the drawing room; and by the blazing fire George sat, in dinner jacket and tie, cuddling the dachshund [….] He said at last: “Go and tear it up”’ (MB 151).

Draft footnote of the day: red flowers in Flanders Fields

104:19-20 Red flowers grew through his flesh John McCrae’s 1915 poem ‘In Flanders Fields’ commemorates the fact of red poppies blooming abundantly in battlefields that saw some of the heaviest casualties during World War One: ‘In Flanders fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses, row on row’ (1-2). Line six begins ‘We are the dead.’ Since 1920, the red poppy has been a symbol of remembrance of the war dead.

Hampstead

Not her most charitable mood, but sometimes I find myself thinking something similar about those #occupy kids. Yeah, they're my heroes, but they're kind of weird...

266:20 Hampstead Village in North London dating from the eighteenth century, where artists and freethinkers have resided. The poet John Keats, who, like Jim Hutton, Woolf imagines in red socks, lived in Hampstead from 1818-1820 (see EN 265.28). He wrote ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ there. Adjacent is the preserved open space of Hampstead Heath. Cf. ‘It’s unfortunate the civilization always lights up the dwarfs, cripples, & sexless people first. And Hampstead provides them’ (D 1:110; 21 January 1918).

Draft footnote of the day: Voltaire

An oldie but a goodie:


77.27-28 getting books sent out to them In 1904, when Leonard Woolf went to Ceylon as a young colonial administrator, he brought with him the complete works of Voltaire in seventy volumes (Glendenning 66).

Draft footnote of the day: Albanians

181:8 Albanians Albania, too, was in the news at this time, although for far different reasons than Armenia and with much less public sympathy from Britain. By 1921, Albania was bankrupt, having been at war continuously since 1910. The discovery of oil led the British-based Anglo-Persian Oil Company to send significant financial support to Ahmed Zogu. Zogu was elected prime minister in 1922, then, president in 1925. In 1928, Albania became a monarchy and Zogu, its king, Zog I. See Vickers.