Writing about Dogs, Why Not? : Flush, the Biography of Elizabeth Barrett's Cocker Spaniel

The aim of this paper is to investigate the writing of animal life, through the analysis of Virginia Woolf's Flush: A Biography (1933). Flush is a significant biographico-fictional experiment in which biography and fiction mingle together. It serves as a criticism concerning the way of experiencing the city and the condition of women in the 1850s, as well as, implicitly, in the 1930s. By highlighting Flush's perceptions, Woolf also manages to have access to Elizabeth Barrett's inner feelings, and, as a consequence, to explore her own emotions in order to control her ghosts with the help of a therapeutic writing. For all these reasons, Flush becomes a life within the life, a work of criticism and, to some extent, of self-revelation.