is generally regarded as one of Virginia Woolf's minor works, written as light-hearted relief from her more demanding and serious novels. Indeed,
Flushdoes not present the stylistic complexity or the formal experimentalism that we find, for instance, in
To the Lighthouseor
The Waves(completed just before the writing of
Flush); however, it also engages with many of Woolf's recurrent concerns.
Flush is often described as the biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning from the point of view of her dog, but, as the title and subtitle suggest, Flush: A Biography is in fact the biography of Flush himself. It is also a parody of biographical writing, mocking from the outset the technique of presenting the biographical subject in the context of his or her family and genealogy by tracing
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Citation: Boldrini, Lucia. "Flush". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 25 October 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=5105, accessed 25 November 2024.]