Flush (Oxford World's Classics) - Softcover

Woolf, Virginia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0199539294 ISBN 13: 9780199539291

Publisher: OUP Oxford, 2009

Synopsis

'I lay in the garden and red the Browning love letters, and the figure of their dog made me laugh so I couldn't resist making him a Life.'

Throughout her career, Woolf invokes the animal world both directly and metaphorically. She started to write a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's spaniel after finishing The Waves, tracing the life of the spaniel from his country origins, his puppyhood spent with the writer Mary Mitford, through his sheltered existence with Elizabeth Barrett in her sick room, and later travels in Florence. But Flush is much more than a playful writer's holiday. As well as offering an exploration of a life of the senses free from the tyranny of words, Flush can be read as an allegorical testimony to the inscrutable, discarded, unrepresentable lives of the Victorian women poets, who were barely discussed or read in the 1930s. From a quite literally low point of view, Woolf explores class and gender in Victorian London, with gently mocking humour. Charming yet also radical, Flush is a work of sensuous imagination, an apparently light text that opens up a range of questions concerning difference which are woven through the whole of Woolf's writing.
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About this title

Review:

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

"A masterpiece... It is not fiction because it has the substance, the reality of truth. It is not biography because it has the freedom, the artistry of fiction" (New York Herald Tribune Books)

Book Description:

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

About this edition

• Publisher: OUP Oxford
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0199539294
• ISBN 13: 9780199539291
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192
• Editor: Flint Kate