Reviews

..the Victorians loved biographies, especially biographies of eminent people such as kings, queens and other distinguished members of society. [b:Flush|18844|Flush|Virginia Woolf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1639102516l/18844._SY75_.jpg|3461240] is the biography of such an eminent Victorian. Or rather [b:Flush|18844|Flush|Virginia Woolf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1639102516l/18844._SY75_.jpg|3461240] is a parody of a biography of an eminent Victorian. We might even say that [b:Flush|18844|Flush|Virginia Woolf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1639102516l/18844._SY75_.jpg|3461240] is a parody of a parody of a biography of an eminent Victorian because [b:Flush|18844|Flush|Virginia Woolf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1639102516l/18844._SY75_.jpg|3461240] is in fact the biography of a dog. But not just any dog, an Eminent Dog, the pure bred Cocker Spaniel belonging to another eminent Victorian, the poet Elizabeth Barrett who eventually married Eminent Victorian Robert Browning after they’d exchanged an entire volume of love letters; they then went to live in Italy, taking Flush along with them.

Spoiler

(Doesn't Elizabeth look a bit like a spaniel?)

That a dog-lover wrote this biography is clear from the outset. The reader even wonders if the book might have been written by a dog, so marvellously done is the dog point of view: the action revolves entirely around sounds, smells and scamperings. But needless to say, [b:Flush|18844|Flush|Virginia Woolf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1639102516l/18844._SY75_.jpg|3461240] wasn’t written by a dog but by Virginia Woolf who it turns out would have loved to have been a dog. In his biography of his aunt, her nephew Quentin Bell, tells us: Flush is not so much a book by a dog lover as a book by someone who would love to be a dog.

So if we're wondering about the unusual choice of biographical subject, the dog rather than his mistress, Quentin's quote seems to give us the answer. But there is also the parody aspect already mentioned. In 1933, Woolf wrote to a friend: I was so tired after finishing 'The Waves' that I lay in the garden and read the Browning love letters, and the figure of the dog made me laugh so I couldn’t resist making him a Life. I wanted to play a joke on Lytton. Lytton Strachey was Woolf’s long time friend and a rather irreverent biographer himself; his [b:Eminent Victorians|108824|Eminent Victorians|Lytton Strachey|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1171591669l/108824._SY75_.jpg|1203789] is a parody of the serious biographical style so beloved of the Victorians.

So now that we’ve chased our tail sufficiently, we are back where we started. The Victorians loved biographies..