Flush a biography

Flush  has never been taken as seriously as Orlando  or Mrs Dalloway  or indeed any of Virginia Woolf’s other books. It is, after all, a biography of a spaniel. Spaniels do not need rooms of their own or lessons in Greek, nor are they inclined to express views that humans deem worthy of commemoration. But Flush is the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel, and as a biographical subject, he is as interesting as any priapic scholar or king.

Flush  was first published in , two years after  The Waves  and eight years before Woolf’s suicide at the age of It was, as Woolf’s diaries reveal, a struggle to write. One might assume that she intended it as an oblique study of Barrett Browning herself, but insofar as it is a biography of the poet at all, it is an unashamedly narrow one. Literary success is of minimal interest to dogs. The literary success of other writers was seldom a cause for celebration by the doggedly competitive Woolf either. In her portrait of the dog, we get a dog’s portrait of the human — the scent of a woman, a flurry of alarming emotions — and only a shadow of the writer.

Elizabeth Moulton Barrett, as she was then, received Flush as a puppy from the author Mary Russell Mitford in At the age of 36 she was still living with her parents at 50 Wimpole

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