Flush

Woolf reconstructs the life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel, following Flush from Wimpole Street into the poet’s courtship with Robert Browning, his abduction in London and the family’s escape to Italy. The dog’s limited viewpoint turns literary biography into an imaginative study of Victorian domestic authority, illness, class, urban poverty and freedom. Although grounded in the Brownings’ correspondence and the documented life of the spaniel, the book invents Flush’s perceptions and emotions, making it a work of biographical fiction rather than conventional non-fiction.