20th Century Flush - Softcover

Woolf, Virginia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140189246 ISBN 13: 9780140189247

Publisher: Penguin Classic, 1995

Synopsis

Flush is Elizabeth Barrett Browning's randy, aristocratic, floppish pet spaniel. In her biography, Virginia Woolf follows Flush's career from his birth in Berkshire and his first years with the invalid, Miss Barrett, through to his kidnapping by London vagabonds and his dotage in Italy. The introduction of this book presents "Flush" alongside Woolf's other biographies, "Roger Fry" and "Orlando", and analyses Woolf's attitude towards servants, especially her fascination with Barrett Browning's maid, Elizabeth Wilson, the inspiration for Margaret Forster's novel, "Lady's Maid".

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Virginia Woolf's biography of Elizabeth Barrett Brownings spaniel was what she called "a little escapade", begun to "ease my brain" in the wake of The Waves (1931). The intensities of that most demanding fiction were soon supplanted by canine psychology and the art of anthropomorphism.

For all its fun and frivolity, Flush is none the less a work seriously inclined to mock and question the genre of biography, as did Woolf's earlier, more ambitious, and more widely read jeu d'esprit, Orlando (1928), and was written in part as a joke at the expense of the biographer Lytton Strachey. Like Orlando it too bespeaks its author's feminism.

In this new edition, which uses as copy-text the second issue of the first English edition and reproduces the original illustrations, Elizabeth Steele maps the events that inspired the book. She provides a wealth of information about its writing and reception - concerning fact and fiction, and Woolf's views on the art of biography - and details its publication history.

From the Inside Flap:

First published in 1933, Flush is the lively story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning?s cocker spaniel, and a glimpse into the life of his owner.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classic
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0140189246
• ISBN 13: 9780140189247
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 112