Flush (Vintage Lives) - Softcover

Woolf, Virginia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099438011 ISBN 13: 9780099438014

Publisher: Vintage, 2002

Synopsis

First published in 1933, Flush is the story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's cocker spaniel. Although Flush has adventures of his own, he is also the means of providing us with glimpses into the life of his owner and her days at Wimpole Street as an invalid, her courtship by Robert Browning, their elopement and life together in Italy.

About this title

Book Description:

A lively and touching biography of the cocker spaniel given to Elizabeth Barrett Browning by Mary Russell Mitford.

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0099438011
• ISBN 13: 9780099438014
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192