Flush
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
Published in 1933 by Hogarth, Flush is an experiment in biography, using the medium of a pet dog, the eponymous character, to examine the imagined life of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. While Woolf's approach is essentially fictional, she used existing correspondence between Browning and her husband, combined with poems about Flush the dog to create non-fictional threads. On these factual underpinnings, Woolf then layered themes that she wished to explore.
Connections to A Room of One's Own come across in the way Woolf deals with Browning's life as a woman writer and intellectual, existing in a patriarchal city environment. In choosing such an approach, Woolf certainly betrays the autobiographical elements in the text, given her own status and also allows her to cover the pressures imposed by her private ailments.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Narrator Eileen Atkins turns in a pitch-perfect performance in this charming audio production of Woolf's biography of poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning's spaniel, Flush. The story uses the dog one of the most famous animals in literary history as a lens for understanding the travails of his owner, the romantic story of her courtship and marriage to Robert Browning, and the class system of mid-19th-century British society. Atkins adopts the proper tender tones in describing the blossoming relationship between Flush and Elizabeth, who feeds him delicacies from her own hand, but changes her voice to depict Flush's fury at being displaced by the interloper Robert. Atkins also beautifully captures the sense of freedom not experienced since puppyhood Flush feels when he's set loose from the confining parlors of Wimpole Street and moved to the sunbaked streets of Italy with the newlyweds.
