On 31 December 1922, Katherine Mansfield wrote what would turn out to be her last letter to her father, Harold Beauchamp, describing her life at the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at Fontainebleau-Avon, France:

As is well known and has become part of her legend, Mansfield had chosen to enter this Institute after trying, without success, numerous medical treatments for her tuberculosis. It was a move ridiculed by several of her contemporaries who thought she was misguidedly turning her back on (Western) medicine in favour of an (Eastern) charlatan, the Armenian-Greek spiritual teacher and philosopher George Gurdjieff. Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence, for example, respectively judged Mansfield to be in the grip of a ‘psychic shark’ in a ‘retreat for maniacs’, a ‘rotten, false, self-conscious place of people playing a sickly stunt’. Even Mansfield's husband, John Middleton Murry, ‘noisily regretted’ her being taken in by ‘the spiritual quackery of Gurdjieff’. It would be easy to read Mansfield's words to her father, with their reference to the smell of cows as having healing properties, as evidence of her wrong-headed decision. In this vein, her claim that she wanted to write a book called ‘The Cowiness of the Cow’ could be dismissed either as a joke or just a silly idea.

When read in full, however, there is little in Mansfield's letter to support the notion that she had lost her senses and given up on her health, while there are also hints that her projected bovine book was more than a passing fancy. She opens with sober commentary on her ‘very tame semi-existence’ at the Institute, with emphasis not on dramatic spiritual revelation but on everyday bodily (dis)comfort: ‘My heart’, she writes, ‘under this new treatment, which is one of graduated efforts and exercise, feels decidedly stronger, and my lungs in consequence feel quieter too.

The introduction charts the ways in which literary studies and animal studies have formed a mutually enriching dialogue. Starting with a selection of contemporary short stories, and exploring questions of exploitation, anthropomorphism, and metaphor, it demonstrates how animals alter the way we think about, write, and read literature. The introduction includes a summary of the chapters contained in the book.

Flush: A Biography (1933) is the only work of fiction written by Virginia Woolf that leaves readers oriented towards an earlier era. Where her other novels end on or around the year of their completion, Woolf’s fictional biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel concludes with its protagonist’s death in June 1854. The list of ‘Authorities’ that directly follows the description of Flush’s demise reinforces the book’s historical gaze by listing the mid-nineteenth-century publications Woolf relied on. Those ‘who would like to check the facts or to pursue the subject further’ should, we are directed, consult two poems by Barrett Browning, ‘To Flush, My Dog’ (1844) and ‘Flush, or Faunus’ (1850), various editions of the Brownings’ letters, and Thomas Beames’s account of slums in The Rookeries of London (1850) (Woolf 1998: 151). As Linden Peach, Jane Goldman and I detail in the Cambridge Edition, Woolf’s misleading qualification ‘that there are very few authorities for the foregoing biography’ (1998: 151) has thrown readers off the scent of the numerous other Victorian sources she drew upon, from Hugh Dalziel’s British Dogs: Their Varieties, History and Characteristics (1888), key for her discussion of spaniel breeds, to Mrs Sutherland Orr’s Life and Letters of Robert Browning (1891) and A. G. L’Estrange’s The Life of Mary Russell Mitford (1870), which provide some of the details of Flush’s human companions. The extent of Woolf’s research not only puts paid to the idea that Flush: A Biography was merely a joke, but demonstrates that she was interested in rescuing him from obscurity and inserting him into his rightful place in (literary) history. As Woolf herself writes in one of her own notes on the text: ‘The whole question of dogs’ relation to the spirit of the age, whether it is possible to call one dog Elizabethan, another Augustan, another Victorian, together,’ she adds with characteristic humour, ‘with the influence upon dogs of the poetry and philosophy of their masters, deserves a fuller discussion than can here be given it’ (1998, 114).

The introduction contextualises the study of Bloomsbury’s beasts in two ways. First, it reflects on strategies for close reading of literary animals and accounts for the emergence and acceleration of modernist animal studies, a subfield that explores links between modernist literature and animality of various stripes; it explains, too, how Bloomsbury can be read as part of modernism’s animal turn while adding an intensified focus on both imaginative transformations and material encounters between human and nonhuman species. Second, in order to show how questions concerning the nonhuman were embedded in the group’s conceptualisation of the human, it provides an overview of how ’beastliness’ (and related terms used in this study) enters the group’s discourse through the different conceptualisations of ‘civilisation’ articulated by its key figures.