The work of this gifted writer is impeccably read by Gretel Davis. Her rich, English voice is a perfect vehicle for the inner voice of Flush, the very pedigreed cocker spaniel. The canine companion of Elizabeth Barrett, Flush gives an eyewitness account of the developing relationship between his owner and Robert Browning. All that we learn of the two poets and lovers is filtered through Flush. This is anthropomorphism at its most blatant, and it's wonderful in every sense. A love of dogs and romance will enhance the listener's experience, but this recording will have wide appeal regardless. C.A.K. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine
--This text refers to the
Audio Cassette
edition.
Product Description
'I lay in the garden and red the Browning love letters, and the figure of their dog made me laugh so I couldn't resist making him a Life.' Throughout her career, Woolf invokes the animal world both directly and metaphorically. She started to write a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's spaniel after finishing The Waves, tracing the life of the spaniel from his country origins, his puppyhood spent with the writer Mary Mitford, through his sheltered existence with Elizabeth Barrett in her sick room, and later travels in Florence. But Flush is much more than a playful writer's holiday. As well as offering an exploration of a life of the senses free from the tyranny of words, Flush can be read as an allegorical testimony to the inscrutable, discarded, unrepresentable lives of the Victorian women poets, who were barely discussed or read in the 1930s. From a quite literally low point of view, Woolf explores class and gender in Victorian London, with gently mocking humour. Charming yet also radical, Flush is a work of sensuous imagination, an apparently light text that opens up a range of questions concerning difference which are woven through the whole of Woolf's writing.
