Flush: A Biography

Flush: A Biography (1933), Woolf's second radical experiment in biography (after Orlando: A Biography) was a runaway best-seller. This life of the pet spaniel of Victorian poets, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning, playfully tests human–animal boundaries and speaks to rising concerns with class, sexuality and eugenics. This edition demonstrates Flush's historical grounding in the Brownings' era and Woolf's own. It provides rigorous, transparent collation of all extant states of Flush published in Woolf's lifetime. The extensive Explanatory Notes offer fresh insight into sociopolitical and literary contexts. This edition presents, for the first time, full transcriptions of Woolf's reading notebooks and drafts, plus the serialised Atlantic Monthly version. The Introduction maps composition history and draws on rediscovered early reviews. It charts Flush's critical reception to current renewed critical interest. This edition establishes Flush as a playfully ironic and seriously experimental work worthy of wide readership and sustained scholarly attention.