Flush: A biography

Virginia Woolf Season
Alison Hennegan, Lecture on Flush (1933), 10 April 2021

Blog by Lisa Hutchins

Flush (1933) might be regarded as a struggle for people who regard themselves as serious readers. Surely the intimidating, fiercely intellectual author of The Waves didn't actually write a light-hearted biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's cocker spaniel? Perhaps it does make people uncomfortable – how are we supposed to take it? – and, as a result, they avoid it. I must state immediately that I have always admired it. I am fond of dogs and I appreciate the skill with which all Flush's real-life mentions in literature and history are mapped onto the story.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

In her lecture in Literature Cambridge's Woolf season, Alison Hennegan advised us to approach Flush as we would any other work by Woolf, as it shares concerns and preoccupations evident throughout her writing. Like Orlando, it has a light, humorous tone but makes plenty of serious points: relations between humans and with animals; the importance of breeding (in several senses); and the nature of consciousness. It belongs with successive attempts by Woolf to interrogate the question of how to tell a life, a theme which is emerging as one of the most interesting in this lecture season.

We heard Flush was conceived as a 'holiday book,' a respite after The Waves and a popular success to secure the finances of the Hogarth Press. In fact, Woolf started writing it before the completion of The Waves, which was taking a heavy toll on her. At the same time, she was reading for volume two of The Common Reader (and attaining a very high level of productivity when she started writing essays). But she was also finding writing a strain and suffering dark thoughts about aging and mortality after close friends Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington had died.

Alison told us Flush was built on a technical failure. Woolf was also working at this time on a formal experiment, a 'novel-essay' that she called The Pargiters. This was a false start which she transformed five years later into The Years. She wrote:  

Why should the P[argiter]s make my heart jump; why should Flush stiffen up the back of my neck? What connection has the brain with the body? Nobody in Harley Street could explain it, yet the symptoms are purely physical and as distinct as one book from the other.

(A Writer's Diary, Sunday 15 Jan. 1932)

Alison drew our attention to the driven nature of this writing, its physical consequences and the relationship between mind and body which was of perpetual interest to Woolf. Some diary entries describe Flush as intractable while The Pargiters was flying along more successfully even than Orlando. Evidence of Woolf's struggles comes from her diary where she says, having read the 30,000 words she had so far written:

I come to the conclusion that they won't do. Oh, what a waste - what a bore! Four months of work and heaven knows how much reading – not of an exalted kind either – and I can't see how to make anything of it. It's not the right subject for that length: it's too slight and too serious.

(A Writer's Diary, 19 Dec. 1932)

Alison framed Flush not as a novelty, but in the context of a whole sub-genre of dog fiction, including works with canine protagonists that Woolf would likely have known. These include Puck: His Vicissitudes, Adventures, Observations, Conclusions, Friendships and Philosophies (1870) and A Dog of Flanders (1872) by Ouida (Marie Louise Ramé), a novelist that Woolf admired. Another was Francis Coventry's The History of Pompey the Little, or, The Life and Adventures of a Lap-Dog (1751) which includes many allusions to real people and much fun with social convention. Woolf's friend, the composer Ethel Smyth, had a succession of Old English sheepdogs called Pan and wrote a playful biography about them. Another genre of interest is the commodity novel, referenced here through the theft and ransom of dogs for commercial gain and the power dynamic this exposes between people, between people and animals and among the kidnapped dogs.

Another familiar theme in this Woolf season has been escape from the stultifying social and gender norms of Victorian society. Alison offered us this passage from Flush to consider:

It was the smell of the room that overpowered him. Only a scholar who has descended step by step into a mausoleum and there finds himself in a crypt, crusted with fungus, slimy with mould, exuding sour smells of decay and antiquity, while half-obliterated marble busts gleam in mid-air and all is dimly seen by the light of the small swinging lamp which he holds, and dips and turns, glancing now here, now there - only the sensations of such an explorer into the buried vaults of a ruined city can compare with the riot of emotions that flooded Flush's nerves as he stood for the first time in an invalid's bedroom, in Wimpole Street, and smelt eau de cologne.

 Alison suggests that Wimpole Street is a powerful symbol of the gulf between rich and poor in Victorian London, and that London itself represents a significant restriction for Flush compared to the country acres in which he grew up. She pointed out that the gift of a valuable pedigree puppy would have represented no small financial sacrifice for Mary Russell Mitford, who gifted him to the young Elizabeth Barrett (echoes of the commodity novel again). 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning loved Flush deeply even if she did not always possess a deep understanding of him. She did not always see that his immediacy and perception of the world through his senses was so different to her own, gained through intellect and a nuanced understanding of time passing. In Flush Woolf gently exposes this misperception and asks unexpectedly profound questions about how we treat our animals, and also each other.

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Coming up next in the Virginia Woolf Season: Dame Gillian Beer will repeat her lecture on Reading The Waves Across a Lifetime on Saturday 24 April (sold out), followed by Anna Snaith on The Years and Claire Davison on Three Guineas.