Woof! Woof! I am a spaniel called Flush and owned by Elizabeth Barret Browning and her husband Robert and this is my amusing but ultimately sad autiobiography. Virginia Woolf's biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 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. The famous literary romance of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning given a funny and poignant slant – it is told from the viewpoint of Elizabeth's adored spaniel, Flush, who bore his mistress's virtual imprisonment as an "invalid" in her father's house, and shared her dramatic flight abroad and subsequent happy married life.
