"Loving friend, the gift of one / Who, her own true faith, hath run"

So begins Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem To Flush My Dog.  It is from this work, as well as the poet's personal correspondence, that Virginia Woolf drew to create her canine biography Flush, first published in 1933.  I especially love this Persephone edition, with such beautiful swirling endpapers!

In the mid-1850's, the poet Elizabeth Barrett (not yet married to Robert Browning) was gifted a spaniel by her friend Mary Mitford.  Upon his arrival in London, Flush experiences difficulty adjusting to his new surroundings.  He wishes to run and sniff and explore, but is forcefully taught that he should be content to sit quietly unless called to do otherwise.  When he is taken for walks, he is led on a chain leash.  The methods in which Flush's innate, wild, spaniel ways are tamed, so that he will fit into London life, function as a metaphor for the ways that women were "trained" to behave as the dominant, patriarchal society deemed appropriate.

When Flush, at one point, is dognapped, Woolf uses the event as a way to illustrate the marked differences between English social classes.  Flush observes the dire squalor in which he now finds himself, and remarks upon the violent behaviors of his captors, who require a high ransom payment in exchange for his return.  With limited opportunities for them to be educated and earn a living, the community of people in the slums of St. Giles have turned to extortion in order to obtain money.  When Flush makes comparisons between the brutal slum and Elizabeth Barrett's comfortable upper-class home, you can see the author commenting on British poverty and classism.

When Elizabeth and her husband Robert move to Italy, Flush remarks on the canine societal differences between that country and England.  Most of all, he notices that all dogs are treated as equals; there are no hierarchies based on breed, lineage, or conformity to a standard of appearance and temperament.  That is, of course, allegorical to the author's understanding of English aristocracy as absurd, because it is based not on individual merit but rather the luck/misfortune of being born to a set of parents, whomever they happen to be.

On one level, Flush is a sweet, pseudo-biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's pet spaniel, creatively written but structured around factual information drawn from the poet's letters and other collected writings.  On another level, the book is a critique of then-modern English society.  The ways that Virginia Woolf writes Flush's interior monologues and observations, and - because Flush is inherently non-human - he is a continual foreigner in his world.  This canine naivete allows Woolf to comment on the socioeconomic and class divides that were so rigid and prevalent in England.



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