Virginia Woolf’s Little-Known Biography of a Cocker Spaniel / Erin Schwartz In: The Paris Review October 18, 2018

In her 1911 opus Toy Dogs and Their Ancestors, Judith Blunt-Lytton, sixteenth baroness of Wentworth, great-granddaughter of Lord Byron, wrote, “It has cost me years of research both in the British Museum and in the picture galleries of Europe to disentangle the truth from the cocoon of falsehood into which it was spun.” What Blunt-Lytton sought to recuperate from the cobwebs of history was the lapdog’s true form. Blunt-Lytton contended that many breeds had recently strayed from their roots, in large part due to the Victorian proliferation of “dog fancying”: a British term that evokes, at once, a group of people who like dogs and a group people who fluff up dogs’ fur and tie ribbons around their necks. Of the spaniel, Blunt-Lytton asserts that the contemporary model “was introduced comparatively recently, certainly no earlier than the year 1840,” and compiles visual evidence of its transformation. The spaniel in Titian’s Venus of Urbino is technically correct, as are eighteenth-century pooches painted by George Stubbs; for comparison, her book contains a mug shot of a puppy described as “noseless atrocity, bred by author,” while another dog’s portrait is captioned: “noseless toy spaniel, with wrongly carried ears and bad expression.”

Twenty-two years later, Virginia Woolf published Flush, a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel, and immediately regretted it. She began work on the book after the draining effort of The Waves. As she read the love letters of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, she was amused by Barrett Browning’s mischievous, cosseted little dog and set out to write its biography. It was easy work at first, miserable by the end (she called the book “that abominable dog Flush”). On the eve of the book’s publication, Woolf felt resignation rather than pride. She wrote in her diary: “I open this to make one of my self-admonishments previous to publishing a book. Flush will be out on Thursday and I shall be very much depressed, I think, by the kind of praise. They’ll say it’s ‘charming,’ delicate, ladylike … I must not let myself believe that I’m simply a ladylike prattler.” In her letters, she dismissed the whole thing as an embarrassing joke. But after her friend Sibyl Colefax praised the book, Woolf confided: “I’m so glad that you liked Flush. I think it shows great discrimination in you because it was all a matter of hints and shades, and practically no one has seen what I was after.”



In Woolf’s Flush,the young dog travels from the hamlet of Three Mile Cross to Wimpole Street in London, trading grass and flowering shrubs for the gloom of Elizabeth Barrett’s back bedroom in her father’s home. It is the room of an unmarried, bookish invalid, redolent of cologne, cluttered with gleaming marble busts, the window shaded by a blind painted with the image of “several peasants taking a walk.” As Elizabeth and Robert Browning elope, Flush travels to Pisa and Florence. He is kidnapped once, ransomed, and has his liver-colored coat trimmed off after a bout of mange. He is skeptical of spiritualism. He dies, peacefully, in Casa Guidi, the Brownings’ home in Italy. ... [mehr] https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/10/18/virginia-woolfs-little-known-biography-of-a-cocker-spaniel/