Other editions of book Flush: A Biography

"Flush: A Biography" by Virginia Woolf, is the biography of a red cocker spaniel that was owned by English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Woolf's inspiration was her own cocker spaniel, Pinka. Woolf had read the letters and poems that Browning had written about her dog, Flush. Woolf decided that he would be an interesting subject for a biography and although it is narrated in the third person, the book is written mainly from the perspective of the dog. As Virginia Woolf implied to a friend, "Flush" was really her dog, "Pinka," who she used as a model for the red cocker.Recognized for her use of stream of conscious, nonlinear prose, and unique narrative perspectives, Virginia Woolf is arguably one of the most prominent writers of the twentieth century.

Flush: A Biography, an imaginative biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's cocker spaniel, is a cross-genre blend of fiction and nonfiction by Virginia Woolf published in 1933. It was Written after the completion of her emotionally draining The Waves, the work returned Woolf to the imaginative consideration of English history that she had begun in Orlando: A Biography, and to which she would return in Between the Acts...(wikipedia.org)

Woolf's best-selling spoof biography of the poet Elizabeth Barrett-Browning's lap dog, Flush, has until recently received relatively little serious critical attention. Flush: A Biography has been read as an allegory of class war, lesbian love, the plight of women writers, and much else besides. In the context of the recent rise in animal studies, this work is ripe for reappraisal. The present essay argues for the novel's significant contribution to the understanding, in Woolf's era and our own, of pressing questions concerning animality in relation to writing, gender and feminism. Woolf's 'little brown dog' speaks to some notorious feminist antivivisectionist cultural works and political interventions in the first decades of the twentieth-century as well as to more recent feminist philosophical interests in animality, and canine animality in particular. (Wiley Online library)

2013 Reprint of 1933 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. "Flush: A Biography," an imaginative biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's cocker spaniel, is a cross-genre blend of fiction and nonfiction published in 1933. Written after the completion of her emotionally draining "The Waves," the work returned Woolf to the imaginative consideration of English history that she had begun in "Orlando: A Biography," and to which she would return in "Between the Acts." Commonly read as a modernist consideration of city life seen through the eyes of a dog, Flush serves as a harsh criticism of the supposedly unnatural ways of living in the city. The figure of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the text is often read as an analogue for other female intellectuals, like Woolf herself, who suffered from illness, feigned or real, as a part of their status as female writers. Most insightful and experimental are Woolf's emotional and philosophical views verbalized in Flush's thoughts. As he spends more time with Barrett Browning, Flush becomes emotionally and spiritually connected to the poet and both begin to understand each other despite their language barriers. For Flush smell is poetry, but for Barrett Browning, poetry is impossible without words. In Flush Woolf examines the barriers that exist between woman and animal created by language yet overcome through symbolic actions.

Virginia Woolf started to write a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's spaniel after finishing The Waves, tracing the life of the spaniel from his country origins, his puppyhood spent with the writer Mary Mitford, through his sheltered existence with Elizabeth Barrett in her sick room, and later travels in Florence. But Flush is much more than a playful writer's holiday. Woolf explores class and gender in Victorian London, with gently mocking humor. Charming yet also radical, Flush is a work of sensuous imagination.

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'I lay in the garden and red the Browning love letters, and the figure of their dog made me laugh so I couldn't resist making him a Life.'Throughout her career, Woolf invokes the animal world both directly and metaphorically. She started to write a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's spaniel after finishing The Waves, tracing the life of the spaniel from his country origins, his puppyhood spent with the writer Mary Mitford,through his sheltered existence with Elizabeth Barrett in her sick room, and later travels in Florence. But Flush is much more than a playful writer's holiday. As well as offering an exploration of a life of the senses free from the tyranny of words, Flush can be read as an allegorical testimonyto the inscrutable, discarded, unrepresentable lives of the Victorian women poets, who were barely discussed or read in the 1930s. From a quite literally low point of view, Woolf explores class and gender in Victorian London, with gently mocking humour. Charming yet also radical, Flush is a work ofsensuous imagination, an apparently light text that opens up a range of questions concerning difference which are woven through the whole of Woolf's writing.

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