Flush: A Biography [Paperback]

A beautifully produced edition - the excellent preface by Sally Beauman demonstrates that there is much autobiography in the biography

Virginia Woolf's Flush, published in 1933, is a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's spaniel, who lived from 1840-54. Its direct inspiration was a new edition, in 1930, of the Brownings' love letters in which 'the figure of their dog made me laugh so I couldn't resist making him a Life.'
Flush was also light relief from The Waves, Virginia's most modernist and 'difficult' novel: 'I enjoy my freak of writing Flush - & think it a good idea ' - this easy indolent writing once in a way - to let my brain cool,' she wrote in September 1932 and, in December, 'I shall take up Flush again to cool myself.'
When she read through the 30,000 words she had misgivings, realising that most reviewers would take refuge (when they were kind) in words like '"charming", delicate, ladylike' and that 'I shall very much dislike the popular success of Flush'. Indeed, although 'practically no one has seen what I was after', Flush was rapidly reprinted (15,000 copies were sold in the first six weeks) and earned the Woolfs extremely respectable sums of money; Virginia's embarrassment raises the perennial question: whether the popular and the critically acclaimed, the best-selling and the literary, always have to be separated by an invisible barrier?
These are questions that are implicit in Sally Beauman's Preface to Flush. Explaining that it purports to be a biography of the spaniel that had been given to the (then) Elizabeth Barrett by her friend, the writer Mary Russell Mitford in 1840, Sally Beauman points out: 'Flush's life has the symmetry of fiction: his two owners and his biographer were women; all three women, Miss Mitford, Elizabeth Barrett and Virginia Woolf were writers, and all three shared a common inheritance: all three struggled throughout their lives to free themselves from the shadow cast by their fathers... Although ostensibly a book about the taming of a pedigree dog, Flush addresses the way society tames and classifies woman', indeed not just tames them but imprisons them: Flush is imprisoned by Taylor, the notorious London dog stealer, and Elizabeth is imprisoned by her father. 'Which is the more frightening, the brutal outlaw Taylor, or the brute-willed father, whose behaviour a whole society endorses and condones? And of course there is a third gaoler hiding in the narrative here. The books tracks the process by which a dog is trained, penned up, leashed, and housebroken.'
Flush is also an exploration of concepts of 'breeding'; Virginia Woolf shows that 'the classifications of Debrett are as absurd and pernicious' as those of the Kennel Club that lead Flush to look up to greyhounds but down on mongrels. 'When we ask what constitutes noble birth,' says Virginia Woolf, 'should our eyes be light or dark, our ears curled our judges merely refer us to our coats of arms. You have none perhaps. Then you are nobody.'
Most people, however, will read Flush simply as a delightful and unique classic, an unusual and extraordinary book by one of our greatest writers; it is, as well, perhaps the most wonderful book about a dog ever written and, as the Times Literary Supplement wrote thirty years after its first publication, 'a triumph of the creative imagination and a little masterpiece of comedy.'