Flush

Flush

Summary

Flush was an English cocker spaniel who belonged to the nineteenth-century poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Virginia Woolf learned of him from the love letters Elizabeth wrote to her future husband, fellow poet Robert Browning, and found ‘the figure of their dog made me laugh so, I couldn't resist making him a Life.’ The resulting ‘biography’ combines sensuous imaginative description with sharp social comment, and brings Woolf’s unsentimental humour and insight to the fore. We see Flush as loyal confidant to Elizabeth on her sickbed at Wimpole Street, and from his jealous perspective we witness her courtship by Browning, their elopement and new life in Italy. The perfect accessible introduction to Woolf’s genius, a unique blend of fact and fiction, Flush is perhaps best read in the company of a canine companion.

This edition includes the four original illustrations by Vanessa Bell and an afterword by Margaret Forster.
Cover designed by the award-winning Finnish designer Aino-Maija Metsola

Reviews

  • A most triumphant trespassing of human imagination into dog sensibilities... The result is a book of irresistible grace and charm
    Spectator

About the author

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf, born in 1882, was the major novelist at the heart of the inter-war Bloomsbury Group. Her early novels include The Voyage Out, Night and Day and Jacob's Room. Between 1925 and 1931 she produced her finest masterpieces, including Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and the experimental The Waves. Her later novels include The Years and Between the Acts, and she also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, journalism and biography, including the passionate feminist essay A Room of One's Own. Suffering from depression, she drowned herself in the River Ouse in 1941.
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