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Author | Virginia Woolf |
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Language | English |
Genre | Fiction/Non-Fiction cross-over |
Publisher | Hogarth Press |
Publication date | 1933 |
Publication place | United Kingdom |
Media type | |
Pages | 163 pp |
OCLC | 542060 |
823/.9/12 | |
LC Class | PR6045.O72 F5 1976 |
Flush: A Biography, an imaginative biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's cocker spaniel, is a cross-genre blend of fiction and nonfiction by Virginia Woolf published in 1933. Written after the completion of her emotionally draining The Waves , the work returned Woolf to the imaginative consideration of English history that she had begun in Orlando: A Biography , and to which she would return in Between the Acts . [1]
Commonly read as a modernist consideration of city life seen through the eyes of a dog, Flush serves as a harsh criticism of the supposedly unnatural ways of living in the city. The figure of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the text is often read as an analogue for other female intellectuals, like Woolf herself, who suffered from illness, feigned or real, as a part of their status as female writers. Most insightful and experimental are Woolf's emotional and philosophical views verbalised in Flush's thoughts. As he spends more time with Barrett Browning, Flush becomes emotionally and spiritually connected to the poet and both begin to understand each other despite their language barriers. For Flush smell is poetry, but for Barrett Browning, poetry is impossible without words. In Flush Woolf examines the barriers that exist between woman and animal created by language yet overcome through symbolic actions.
The book, due to its subject matter, has often been considered one of her less serious artistic endeavours; however, she uses her distinctive stream of consciousness style to experiment with a non-human perspective. In places the novella plays with realism by allowing Flush an improbable amount of perception for a canine (Flush seems to grasp some idea of social class in humans, a concept recurrently criticized in the story as he becomes more "democratic" later in life), and can "talk" to other dogs on the street. At other times the reader is forced to interpret events from the dog's limited knowledge (Flush sees her owner agitated over markings on a paper and cannot understand that she is in love).
For material, Woolf drew primarily on Barrett Browning's two poems on dogs ("To Flush, My Dog" and "Flush or Faunus") and on the published correspondence of the poet and her husband, Robert Browning. From this material, Woolf creates a biography that works on three levels. It is overtly a biography of a dog's life. Since this dog is of interest primarily for its owner, the work is also an impressionistic biography of Elizabeth Barrett during the most dramatic years of her life. At this level, Flush mostly recapitulates the romantic legend of Barrett Browning's life: early confinement by a mysterious illness and a doting but tyrannical father; a passionate romance with an equally talented poet; an elopement that permanently estranges the father, but which allows Barrett Browning to find happiness and health in Italy. On a third level, the book gives Woolf an opportunity to return to some of her most frequent topics: the glory and misery of London; the Victorian mindset; class differences; and the ways in which women oppressed by "fathers and tyrants" may find freedom.
Woolf ostensibly uses the life of a dog as pointed social criticism, ranging across topics from feminism and environmentalism to class conflict.
This unusual biography traces the life of Flush from his carefree existence in the country, to his adoption by Ms. Browning and his travails in London, leading up to his final days in a bucolic Italy. The story begins by alluding to Flush's pedigree and birth in the household of Barrett Browning's impecunious friend Mary Russell Mitford. Woolf emphasises the dog's conformity to the guidelines of The Kennel Club, using those guidelines as a symbol of class difference that recurs throughout the work. Declining an offer from the brother of Edward Bouverie Pusey for the puppy, Mitford gave Flush to Elizabeth, then convalescent in a back room of the family house on Wimpole Street in London.
Flush leads a restrained but happy life with the poet until she meets Robert Browning; the introduction of love into Barrett Browning's life improves her health tremendously, but leaves the forgotten dog heartbroken. Woolf draws on passages from the letters to depict Flush's attempted mutinies: that is, he attempts to bite Browning, who remains unharmed.
The drama of the courtship is interrupted by Flush's dognapping. While accompanying Barrett Browning shopping, he is snatched by a thief and taken to the nearby rookery St Giles. This episode, a conflation of three real times on which Flush was stolen, ends when the poet, over her family's objections, pays the robbers six guineas (£6.30) to have the dog returned. It provides Woolf the opportunity for an extended meditation on the poverty of mid-century London, and on the blinkered indifference of many of the city's wealthy residents.
After his rescue, Flush is reconciled to his owner's future husband, and he accompanies them to Pisa and Florence. In these chapters, his own experiences are described equally with Barrett Browning's, as Woolf warms to the theme of the former invalid rejuvenated by her escape from paternal control. Barrett Browning's first pregnancy and the marriage of her maid, Lily Wilson, are described; Flush himself is represented as becoming more egalitarian in the presence of the mongrel dogs of Italy.
In the last chapters, Woolf describes a return to London after the death of Barrett Browning's father; she also touches on husband and wife's enthusiasm for the Risorgimento and for spiritualism. Flush's death, indeed, is described in terms of the strange Victorian interest in knocking tables: "He had been alive; he was now dead. That was all. The drawing-room table, strangely enough, stood perfectly still."
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was an English poet of the Victorian era, popular in Britain and the United States during her lifetime and frequently anthologised after her death. Her work received renewed attention following the feminist scholarship of the 1970s and 1980s, and greater recognition of women writers in English.
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer. She is considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors. She pioneered the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.
The Barretts of Wimpole Street is a 1934 American romantic drama film directed by Sidney Franklin based on the 1930 play of the same title by Rudolf Besier. It depicts the real-life romance between poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, despite the opposition of her abusive father Edward Moulton-Barrett. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture and Shearer was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. It was written by Ernest Vajda, Claudine West, and Donald Ogden Stewart, from the successful 1930 play The Barretts of Wimpole Street by Rudolf Besier, and starring Katharine Cornell.
Robert Browning was an English poet and playwright whose dramatic monologues put him high among the Victorian poets. He was noted for irony, characterization, dark humour, social commentary, historical settings and challenging vocabulary and syntax.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1841.
Mrs Dalloway is a novel by Virginia Woolf published on 14 May 1925. It details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a fictional upper-class woman in post-First World War England. It is one of Woolf's best-known novels.
Victoria Mary, Lady Nicolson, CH, usually known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author and garden designer.
Margaret Forster was an English novelist, biographer, memoirist, historian and critic, best known for the 1965 novel Georgy Girl, made into a successful film of the same name, which inspired a hit song by The Seekers. Other successes were a 2003 novel, Diary of an Ordinary Woman, biographies of Daphne du Maurier and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and her memoirs Hidden Lives and Precious Lives.
Mary Russell Mitford was an English essayist, novelist, poet and dramatist. She was born at Alresford in Hampshire, England. She is best known for Our Village, a series of sketches of village scenes and vividly drawn characters based upon her life in Three Mile Cross near Reading in Berkshire.
A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf, first published in September 1929. The work is based on two lectures Woolf delivered in October 1928 at Newnham College and Girton College, women's colleges at the University of Cambridge.
Orlando: A Biography is a novel by Virginia Woolf, first published on 11 October 1928. Inspired by the tumultuous family history of the aristocratic poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West, Woolf's lover and close friend, it is arguably one of her most popular novels; Orlando is a history of English literature in satiric form. The book describes the adventures of a poet who changes sex from man to woman and lives for centuries, meeting the key figures of English literary history. Considered a feminist classic, the book has been written about extensively by scholars of women's writing and gender and transgender studies.
Flush may refer to:
The Hours, a 1998 novel by Michael Cunningham, is a tribute to Virginia Woolf's 1923 work Mrs. Dalloway; Cunningham emulates elements of Woolf's writing style while revisiting some of her themes within different settings. The Hours won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 1999 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and was later made into an Oscar-winning 2002 film of the same name.
Three Guineas is a book-length essay by Virginia Woolf, published in June 1938.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Wimpole Street is a street in Marylebone, central London. Located in the City of Westminster, it is associated with private medical practice and medical associations.
The Barretts of Wimpole Street is a 1957 British CinemaScope historical film originating from the United Kingdom; it was a re-make of the earlier 1934 version by the same director, Sidney Franklin. Both films are based on the 1930 play The Barretts of Wimpole Street by Rudolf Besier. The screenplay for the 1957 film is credited to John Dighton, but Franklin used exactly the same script for the second movie as he did for the first. The film, set in the early 19th century, stars Jennifer Jones, John Gielgud, and Bill Travers.
The Barretts of Wimpole Street is a 1930 play by the Dutch/English dramatist Rudolf Besier, based on the romance between Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, and her domineering father's unwillingness to allow them to marry. Presented first at the Malvern Festival in August 1930, the play transferred to the West End, where it ran for 528 performances. An American production, produced by and starring Katharine Cornell, opened in 1931 and ran on Broadway for 370 performances. The play has subsequently been revived onstage and adapted for television and the cinema.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Biography by Margaret Forster, first published in 1988, is a biography of the English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, which won the Heinemann Award in 1989. Forster draws on newly discovered letters and papers that shed light on the poet's life before she met and eloped with Robert Browning, and rewrites the myth of the invalid poet guarded by an ogre-like father, to give a more-nuanced picture of an active, difficult woman who was complicit in her own virtual imprisonment. It remained the most-detailed published biography of the poet in 2003, and was one of the best known of Forster's biographies in 2016.
Julia Prinsep Stephen was an English Pre-Raphaelite model and philanthropist. She was the wife of the biographer Leslie Stephen and mother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, members of the Bloomsbury Group.