virginia woolf flush a biography

Satire and Significant Otherness in Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography

• First Online: 23 August 2023

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• Saskia McCracken 6  

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature ((PSAAL))

Virginia Woolf’s bestseller Flush: A Biography (1933)—the life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel—has only recently received proper critical attention. Woolf scholars Anna Snaith and Linden Peach have demonstrated the need to consider her “joke” biography (in her own words) as “part of Woolf’s anti-fascist writing of the 1930s”. Woolf’s focus in Flush: A Biography on pedigree must also, I argue, be read as satirising Darwinian, Victorian eugenicist discourse. I have transcribed the earliest manuscript draft of Flush: A Biography and unearthed excised passages that reveal Woolf’s close engagement with Darwin’s work on dogs and human racial pedigree (inspired by his cousin Francis Galton, who coined the term “eugenic”), in The Descent of Man (1871). Woolf’s passages are also more explicitly political—regarding issues of race, class, and gender—than the published version. I argue, drawing on the critical race and animal theory of Bénédicte Boisseron, Maneesha Deckha, and Srinivas Aravamudan, that we must read Woolf’s satire of pedigree in Flush: A Biography , particularly the manuscript version, with reference to Darwin’s attitudes on racial purity, class, and eugenics. I will show that, while Darwin supported a liberal version of eugenics, Woolf challenged this outlook using his own canine tropes against him, and against the classist and racialised proto-eugenicist views expressed in The Descent of Man . At the same time, however, I will consider how Woolf’s satire (if it is such) risks reinforcing the racist and animalised representation of the working classes which she challenges. Donna Haraway calls for canine stories that “teach us to pay attention to significant otherness”— Flush: A Biography is such a story, one that engages, on satirical, Darwinian, and political levels, with human and animal significant otherness. What is at stake here, as Haraway says, is “who and what gets to count as an actor” in a post-Darwin world.

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Woolf, Letters 140, 155, 161.

Snaith, Of fanciers, 632.

Haraway, Companion Species , 27.

Peach, Ryan and Goldman, Introduction, 14–15, 51, 10, 21.

For these intertexts, see my 2021 doctoral thesis, which this chapter draws on extensively, and Peach, Ryan and Goldman, Introduction.

Deckha, Intersectionality, 252.

Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans , 29.

Boisseron, Afro-Dog , 1–36.

Dubino, Evolution, 144.

Woolf, FMS 1, 59, 147, 149, 151, 153, 155; Woolf, Flush 7. Throughout I use Peach, Ryan, and Goldman’s pagination for their forthcoming edition of Flush: A Biography .

Woolf, FMS 1, 9, 123, 163, 169; Woolf, Flush 7, 12.

Woolf, FMS 1, 121, 157, 211.

Ibid., 135.

Woolf, Flush , 7.

Ibid., Emphasis added.

Ibid., 9, 10.

Dubino, Evolution, 145; Darwin, Origin , 90.

Squier, Virginia Woolf and London , 124.

Light, Servants, 50.

Rosenthal, Virginia Woolf , 206.

Dubino, Evolution, 143, 148.

Ibid., 147. Emphasis added.

Snaith, Of fanciers, 626–7.

Ibid., 626–7.

Ibid., 631.

Childs, Modernism and Eugenics , 27.

Peach, Woolf and eugenics, 439.

Childs, Modernism and Eugenics , 25.

Woolf, Letters , 187.

Ibid., 273.

Cuddy-Keane, Rhetoric, 150.

Ibid., 150, 151.

Darwin, Descent , 168, 63–4.

Ibid., 46, 159.

Moore and Desmond, Introduction, Descent , xlvi.

Darwin, Letter, np.

Galton, Hereditary Genius , 415.

Darwin, Descent , 159.

Ibid., 688.

Ibid., 159.

Woolf, Flush , 11.

Ibid., 127.

Ibid., 131.

Woolf, FMS 1, 157.

Haraway, Companion Species , 27, 28.

Cuddy-Keane, Rhetoric, 151.

Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans , 38.

Woolf, A Room of One’s Own , 48.

Goldman, Chien, 75.

Woolf, A Room of One’s Own , 39.

Behn, Oroonoko , 81.

Ibid., 140.

Woolf, A Room of One’s Own , 4.

Woolf, FMS 1, 153.

Ibid., 121.

Ibid., Emphases added.

Snaith, Of fanciers, 630.

Ibid., 629.

Woolf, FMS 1, 119.

Woolf, Flush , 146.

Woolf, Flush , 105.

Snaith, Of fanciers, 631.

Woolf, FMS 1, 121.

Woolf, FMS 1, 113.

Woolf, Essays , 96. Emphasis added.

Woolf, FMS 1, 25, 59, 75.

Woolf, FMS 1, 75. Emphasis added.

Woolf, Flush , 81.

Woolf, FMS 1, 61.

Woolf, Flush , 80.

Woolf, FMS 1, 65.

Woolf, Flush , 73.

Woolf, FMS 1, 25; Woolf, Flush 83.

Woolf, FMS 1, 67; Woolf, Flush 74.

Woolf, FMS 1, 59.

Ibid., 70, 89.

Beames 124, 130, 151.

Ibid., 96, 143, 150.

Darwin, Descent 159.

Woolf, Flush , 75. Emphasis added.

Snaith, Of fanciers, 623.

Ibid., 627.

Greenslade, Degeneration , 38.

Snaith, Of fanciers, 624.

Darwin, Descent 210, 159.

Snaith, Of fanciers, 624. Original emphasis.

Woolf, FMS 1, 75.

Woolf, FMS 2, 66, 71.

Clarke, The “increasing”, 33.

Woolf, Flush , 43.

Clarke, The “increasing”, 32, 33.

Green, Black Edwardians , xiii.

See Carr, Goldman, Hovey, Marcus.

See Seshagiri.

Woolf, Jacob’s Room , 7, 109.

Woolf, Orlando , 235.

Woolf, Between the Acts , 163, 79; See also McCracken, (R)evolutionary Animal, 172–3.

Seshagiri, Orienting, 59.

Woolf, FMS 1, 63

Woolf, Flush , 37, 57.

Woolf, FMS 1, 73.

Moore and Desmond, Introduction, xxxv.

See Ahmida.

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McCracken, S. (2023). Satire and Significant Otherness in Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography . In: McKay, R., McHugh, S. (eds) Animal Satire. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24872-6_16

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Flush : A Biography

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Flush: A Biography, an imaginative biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's cocker spaniel, is a cross-genre blend of fiction and nonfiction by Virginia Woolf published in 1933. Written after the completion of her emotionally draining The Waves, the work returned Woolf to the imaginative consideration of English history that she had begun in Orlando: A Biography, and to which she would return in Between the Acts. Commonly read as a modernist consideration of city life seen through the eyes of a dog, Flush serves as a harsh criticism of the supposedly unnatural ways of living in the city. The figure of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the text is often read as an analogue for other female intellectuals, like Woolf herself, who suffered from illness, feigned or real, as a part of their status as female writers. Most insightful and experimental are Woolf's emotional and philosophical views verbalised in Flush's thoughts. As he spends more time with Barrett Browning, Flush becomes emotionally and spiritually connected to the poet and both begin to understand each other despite their language barriers. For Flush smell is poetry, but for Barrett Browning, poetry is impossible without words. In Flush Woolf examines the barriers that exist between woman and animal created by language yet overcome through symbolic actions.

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Book Source: Digital Library of India Item 2015.173588

dc.contributor.author: Virginia Woolf dc.contributor.other: State Central Library, Hyderabad. dc.date.accessioned: 2015-07-07T03:43:13Z dc.date.available: 2015-07-07T03:43:13Z dc.date.digitalpublicationdate: 0000-00-00 dc.date.citation: 1933 dc.identifier.barcode: 2990110009349 dc.identifier.origpath: /data/upload/0009/354 dc.identifier.copyno: 1 dc.identifier.uri: http://www.new.dli.ernet.in/handle/2015/173588 dc.description.scanningcentre: State Central Library, Hyderabad dc.description.main: 1 dc.description.tagged: 0 dc.description.totalpages: 172 dc.format.mimetype: application/pdf dc.language.iso: English dc.publisher.digitalrepublisher: Bis/chief Librarian, Scl, Hyderabad. dc.publisher: Leonard And Virginia Woolf At The Hogarth Press, London. dc.rights: Out_of_copyright dc.source.library: State Central Library, Hyderabad. dc.subject.classification: History dc.title: Flush A Biography

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About the author

Virginia woolf.

Virginia Woolf is now recognized as a major twentieth-century author, a great novelist and essayist and a key figure in literary history as a feminist and a modernist. Born in 1882, she was the daughter of the editor and critic Leslie Stephen, and suffered a traumatic adolescence after the deaths of her mother, in 1895, and her step-sister Stella, in 1897, leaving her subject to breakdowns for the rest of her life. Her father died in 1904 and two years later her favourite brother Thoby died suddenly of typhoid.

With her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, she was drawn into the company of writers and artists such as Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, later known as the Bloomsbury Group. Among them she met Leonard Woolf, whom she married in 1912, and together they founded the Hogarth Press in 1917, which was to publish the work of T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster and Katherine Mansfield as well as the earliest translations of Freud. Woolf lived an energetic life among friends and family, reviewing and writing, and dividing her time between London and the Sussex Downs. In 1941, fearing another attack of mental illness, she drowned herself.

Her first novel, The Voyage Out, appeared in 1915, and she then worked through the transitional Night and Day (1919) to the highly experimental and impressionistic Jacob's Room (1922). From then on her fiction became a series of brilliant and extraordinarily varied experiments, each one searching for a fresh way of presenting the relationship between individual lives and the forces of society and history. She was particularly concerned with women's experience, not only in her novels but also in her essays and her two books of feminist polemic, A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938).

Her major novels include Mrs Dalloway (1925), the historical fantasy Orlando (1928), written for Vita Sackville-West, the extraordinarily poetic vision of The Waves (1931), the family saga of The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941). All these are published by Penguin, as are her Diaries, Volumes I-V, and selections from her essays and short stories.

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