Flush is the story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's spaniel, recounting his fourteen–year life from his ancestry to his death. Flush is a dog memoir, about a dog's life, with a dog's point of view and, in some editions, with dog photos (Smith 352; see also Humm). So often is Flush read as a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning—more specifically, of the years leading up to her life with Robert Browning, their escape to Italy, and the first part of their lives together there—that it is easy to forget, as the narrator proclaims in the first sentence, that Flush is the “subject of this memoir” (3). And, today, Flush—or more Specifically, the origins of his “family,” the spaniel—will be the subject of my paper.

Quentin Bell wrote that Flush was “not so much a book by a dog lover as a book by someone who would love to be a dog” (175). I am not going to look at the way Woolf imagines herself as a dog as such. Critics would agree that Flush is an anthropomorphized character, but the extent to which the novel/biography is about “canine consciousness” (Ittner) itself —or the “dogginess of the dog” (Goldman, “Ce Chien ” 100)—is under debate by critics such as Jutta Ittner and Dan Wylie. Rather than explore the extent to which Woolf enters into Giorgio Agamben's Open, or the cerebral space inhabited by nonhuman animals and accessible to humans, I want to explore the way she constructs, broadly, canine context. As Anna Snaith notes, Woolf 's interest in writing Flush had “all to do with context” (615). Other critics have examined an array of these contexts and significations; to cite just a few, Susan Squier looks at the woman writer's journey from imprisonment to freedom; Pamela Caughie, the interplay of highbrow art and mass culture; Snaith herself, eugenics, race, and fascism; David Eberly, the emotionally fraught world of Woolf 's own human, domestic relationships; Jacqui Griffiths, childhood and the oedipal triangle; and Wendy Faris, animals as vehicles for Bloomsbury's expressions of the suppressed emotional life.