Flush: A Biography (1933), Woolf's second radical experiment in biography (after Orlando: A Biography) was a runaway best-seller. This life of the pet spaniel of Victorian poets, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning, playfully tests humananimal boundaries and speaks to rising concerns with class, sexuality and eugenics. This edition demonstrates Flush's historical grounding in the Brownings' era and Woolf's own. It provides rigorous, transparent collation of all extant states of Flush published in Woolf's lifetime. The extensive Explanatory Notes offer fresh insight into sociopolitical and literary contexts. This edition presents, for the first time, full transcriptions of Woolf's reading notebooks and drafts, plus the serialised Atlantic Monthly version. The Introduction maps composition history and draws on rediscovered early reviews. It charts Flush's critical reception to current renewed critical interest. This edition establishes Flush as a playfully ironic and seriously experimental work worthy of wide readership and sustained scholarly attention.
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The first scholarly and comprehensively annotated edition of Flush: A Biography, which establishes its long-overlooked importance within the Woolf canon.
List of illustrations; List of maps; General editors' preface; Notes on
the edition; Acknowledgements; Chronology of Woolf's life and work; List of
abbreviations; List of archival sources for manuscript, Typescript and proof
material relating to Flush: A Biography; List of editorial symbols;
Introduction; Chronology of the composition of Flush: A Biography; Maps;
Flush: A Biography; Explanatory notes; Textual apparatus; Textual notes;
Appendix I. The Atlantic Monthly text of 'Flush'; Appendix II. Flush Reading
Notebook transcription; Appendix III. Flush fragment, early draft and
authorities transcriptions; Appendix IV. Flush later draft transcription;
Appendix V. 'To Flush, My Dog' by Elizabeth Barrett Browning; Appendix VI.
List of reviews of Flush: A Biography.
Linden Peach has held professorships at a number of universities. He has published extensively on modern and contemporary writing, and his most recent books are New Perspectives on Gillian Clarke: Community, Cosmology, Climate and Conflict (2025) and Animals, Animality and Controversy in Modern Welsh Literature and Culture (2022). He is a Fellow of the English Association and of the Royal Society of Arts. Derek Ryan is Senior Lecturer in Modernist Literature at the University of Kent. He is author and editor of multiple books, including his most recent monograph Bloomsbury, Beasts and British Modernist Literature (2022), and essay collections A History of the Bloomsbury Group (2025) and The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Animals (2023). He is Series Editor of Edinburgh University Press's Virginia Woolf Variations. Jane Goldman, Reader in English (Glasgow University), is a literary critic, textual editor and poet. A general editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf, she is author of The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf (1998), The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf (2012), 'With You in the Hebrides': Virginia Woolf and Scotland (2013) and many essays on Woolf's canine aesthetics.
