Page references are to the play published by Currency Press.

p. 2: AMP Building, Circular Quay: a landmark building near the Sydney Harbour ferry terminal in Sydney.

Stevie Smith (1902–1971) English poet and writer whose poem ‘Not Waving but Drowning’ epitomizes the sense of modern desperation.

p. 3: Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682) English writer and medical practitioner whose most famous work is Religio Medici and whose most learned is Pseudodoxia Epidemica or ‘Vulgar Errors,’ which contains this comment.

p. 6: D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930). Novelist, short-story writer, poet and playwright whose relationship with Frieda Weekley, with whom he eloped, was as tempestuous as Katherine suggests in the play. Lawrence also died of tuberculosis.

Cornwall, St Ives: county and town in the South West of England. The comparatively mild climate is helpful to tubercular patients.

p. 7: Virginia Woolf (1882–1941). One of the Bloomsbury group of artists and writers with whom Mansfield had contact. Woolf disapproved of, but also admired, Mansfield, and said of their relationship, ‘never again shall I have one like it.’ Woolf’s novels, stories and essays are now regarded as leading feminist work, especially the essay, ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1929). She committed suicide by drowning.

Alistair Crowley (1875–1947). A minor poet who dabbled in black magic.

p. 9: Hydrotherapy etc.: advertised as part of the regime at Gurdjieff’s Institute. Duliotherapy is a lesser form of worship, derived from the Greek words meaning ‘service’ and ‘slave’.

p. 11: ‘ Remember me ... into the silent land’. The lines are from ‘Remember’ by Christina Rossetti (1830–1894).

p. 18: Botanical Gardens: adjacent to Circular Quay, Sydney.

p. 19: Dr Manhoukin: Dr Ivan Manhoukin, a Russian in exile in Paris, claimed to cure tuberculosis by irradiating the spleen with x-rays.

p. 21: Grand Lama of Tibet: the Dalai or Grand Lama is the principal of the two highest religious leaders of Tibet and Mongolia.

p. 24: Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language: A famous collection first published in 1861, and subsequently until 1965.

p. 29: H.D.: Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961), American-born poet associated with the Bloomsbury Group and one of the chief Imagist poets, concentrating on ‘a sharp, spare use of natural imagery,’ and using images for their own sake, not as metaphors.

p. 41: Bolshevik, White Army: the Bolsheviks (Communists after 1918) overcame the Royalist White Army in the Russian Revolutionary War, 1917–1922.

Pyatigorsk: an industrial and spa city in the south Caucasus.

p. 47: Garsington: Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire was, from 1915–1927, the home of Lady Ottoline Morrell and her husband who entertained their distinguished literary and political guests. D. H. Lawrence includes a thinly-disguised scene at Garsington in Women in Love.