Across the widest gulf: nonhuman subjectivity in Virginia Woolf's Flush

Craig Smith

In 1933 Virginia Woolf published Flush: A Biography, an experiment in genre that purports to tell the life story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's canine companion. It was Woolf's most popular book during her lifetime, but it has subsequently become her most neglected. Scholarly opinion has generally dismissed Flush as a trivial potboiler, unworthy of its author's position as a major modernist innovator. The present essay will attempt to reassess that judgment by viewing the text in relation to recent developments in the study of animal behavior and nonhuman subjectivity, by assessing the reasons for critical hostility toward the book, and by analyzing Woolf's own conflicted views on her project.

As a dog story, Flush belongs to a subgenre of the literary animal story. The first successful English novel with an animal protagonist is Anna Sewell's Black Beauty (1877). Sewell deploys the conventions of Victorian first-person narrative in writing an equine "autobiography." Her protagonist's experiences could only have befallen a horse, but his voice and emotions are recognizably human. This divided, anthropomorphic narrative subjectivity facilitates the author's project of inspiring sympathy for the plight of abused horses. In the early twentieth century, the many animal stories of Colette display a similar moral purpose. Jack London's The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906) exercise a more "masculine" emotional detachment, developing Nietzschean allegories of heroic atavism. London's superdogs shed the "feminizing" influence of civilization, returning to an unspoiled feral state.

Among Woolf's high modernist contemporaries, Mikhail Bulgakov puts a canine character to satiric service in Heart of a Dog (1925). Bulgakov takes the pretext of the fantastic dog story as a vehicle for commentary on distinctly human political issues. This becomes the favored form for dog stories by postmodernists such as Harlan Ellison. Flush, in contrast to other classics of the animal story genre, is neither specifically humane nor specifically humanistic in its agenda. Rather, it represents Woolf's attempt to exercise modernist literary techniques in the mapping of a canine subjectivity, as an experiment worth performing for its own sake.

Woolf's book has numerous direct or indirect successors. Eric Knight's widely imitated adventure story Lassie Come-Home, appearing seven years after Flush, tries to evoke the particularities of canine experience for a specifically young adult audience. The dog memoir has formed a distinct branch within the canine subgenre of the literary animal story. Later writers as various as John Steinbeck (Travels with Charlie),Jacqueline Susann (Every Night, Josephine!), and Paul Auster (Timbuktu have described their own canine relationships. But perhaps only My Dog Tulip, by Woolf's Bloomsbury acquaintance J. R. Ackerley, matches Flush in seriousness of methodology and elegance of execution.

A fresh critical response to Flush must first take account of the explicit nature of Woolf's project: to write the biography of a dog. To date, attempts to explicate this text have approached it as a feminist allegory of the subjugation of women in Victorian England. (1) This has had the unfortunate effect of implying that Flush may be accepted as a serious object of study only to the extent that it may be represented as being not really about a dog. The anthropocentric bias that underlies these readings has its discursive foundation in the Enlightenment.

Descartes formulated modern anthropocentrism in his distinction between humans, who by virtue of reason are aware of their experience, and nonhuman animals, which he claims are effectively machines lacking in significant self-awareness. Descartes's followers took this view to its logical conclusion, insisting that nonhuman animals are incapable of even such basic experiences as physical pleasure or pain. That position became the standard justification for vivisection and other abusive practices. As the zoologist James Serpell points out in his deconstruction of this discourse, Descartes's theory provided a rationalization for practices previously justified on theological grounds:

The early Christian (and Aristotelian) view that animals were created purely for the benefit of mankind, and the Cartesian idea that they were incapable of suffering, were mutually compatible variations on the same theme. Both provided human beings with a license to kill; a permit to use or abuse other life-forms with total impunity. (170)

Charles Darwin, in one of his most extraordinary interventions against the established order, challenged the Cartesian divide by pointedly studying human and animal consciousness as points in a continuum of experience (Masson 162-63). But Darwin's attempt to counter the claims of anthropocentrism in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) met with even greater resistance than his theory of natural selection. Resistance to the investigation of animal emotion and consciousness, as opposed to mechanistic animal behavior, persists in science to this day; most of the modern investigation of animal consciousness has occurred in the relatively marginalized and underfinanced work of wildlife field observers.

There is an obvious economic imperative to maintain the Cartesian divide. Serpell describes the ethical bind that arises from the arbitrary distinction between animals raised to be slaughtered and tormented, by commerce and by science, and animals raised to be pampered and valued in themselves as pets (3-20). The intimate awareness of non-human emotion that we experience in living with dogs or cats throws into question our exploitation of other species (and less fortunate members of these same species) that have demonstrably comparable levels of intelligence. Rather than acknowledge the ethical bind involved in our treatment of agricultural, sport, and laboratory animals, we in our culture save face by denigrating our own observation and experience with companion animals. We characterize pet keeping as a decadent manifestation of late capitalism and misspent postindustrial resources-a stereotype that falls apart if one takes account of the widespread and ardent practice of pet keeping among the native peoples of the Americas and the Pacific from prehistoric times to the present (Serpell 60-72).

Our continued reliance on the Cartesian divide in maintaining our scientific and commercial arrangements has even been discredited by its own methods. In the 1970s, a study at the Johns Hopkins Medical School found that dogs experienced measurably reduced levels of stress when gently caressed by lab workers while being subjected to intense electric shocks (Serpell 120-23). That is, the Johns Hopkins researchers objectively established the ethically insupportable nature of their own experiment: they proved that the dogs in question experienced emotional affect in the presence of human beings who were colluding in their torture. However, this study has proved no more influential than Darwin's. Instead, the scientific community has elected not to know what it knows, effectively returning the Cartesian divide to its origins in culturally mandated superstition. As the psychologist Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson notes, animal emotion "is regarded as too dangerous to be part of the scientific colloquy--such a minefield o f subjectivity that no investigation of it should take place" (17).

This discourse has been crucial to the reception of Flush, in that the bad faith by which the Cartesian divide is maintained depends on the equation of anthropomorphism with sentimentality: to view nonhuman animal consciousness in human terms is, ipso facto, to sentimentalize it. This categorically precludes any view of animal consciousness whatever, since human terms are the only ones we possess. Literature, categorized as one of the "soft" disciplines, remains in a position subservient to the "hard" scientific disciplines of the modern university. Flush must be placed in the context of this discourse, which was already in place in Woolf's time. It was with good reason that she was sensitive to ridicule by critics who wrote from the position of "masculine" detachment, with its paranoid exclusion of "feminine" intuitive observation. Woolf was particularly fearful of being dismissed as "sentimental."

Ethologists--scientists devoted to observing animals in their native habitats--have found a critical form of anthropomorphism to be consistent with their projects, particularly in exploring the cognitive processes of nonhuman species. Donald Griffin, who first theorized the method that is now standard among ethologists, refutes the charge of sentimentality thus:

[I]t is actually no more anthropomorphic, strictly speaking, to postulate mental experiences in another species than to compare its bony structure, nervous system, or antibodies with our The charge carries weight only if one assumes in advance that animals do not have such experiences, and thus the accusation merely reiterates the original assumption.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas has observed that laboratory experiments concerned with animal behavior, far from providing reliable models of objective observation, are rendered essentially useless by their invasive and artificial nature (3).The intuitive, anecdotal methods developed by wildlife observers, deploying anthropomorphism within carefully maintained critical boundaries, remain the most reliable means of researching animal behavior as well as animal consciousness.

As described by Quentin Bell, Woolf's methods in writing Flush are related to those of modern ethologists in their guiding premises and in the sensibility they manifest. Flush is usually described, if it is described at all, as the story of Robert Browning's courtship of Elizabeth Barrett as seen through the eyes of Barrett's cocker spaniel. This is accurate as far as it goes, but defining Flush in these terms is not unlike defining the Grasmere Journal as a book about the poet William Wordsworth as seen through the eyes of his sister. Woolf follows the outline of the historical Flush's biography as reconstructed from the Browning letters and other scattered sources. She describes his first months at his suburban home with Mary Russell Mitford, his incarceration in the sick room of Elizabeth Barrett in Wimp ole Street, his more traumatic incarceration among dognappers in the slum of Whitechapel, and his last years with the Brownings at Pisa and Florence. But Woolf does not simply provide a secondary account o f the Brownings' travails and itinerary. As Bell observes, she attempts "to describe Wimpole Street, Whitechapel and Italy from a dog's point of view, to create a canine world of smells, fidelities and lusts" (409).

Bell does not locate the original of Woolf's Flush in a human personality but in Pinka, the golden cocker spaniel presented to Woolf by Vita Sackville-West (409). Indeed, a photograph of Pinka posing as Flush in aVictorian interior serves as the book's frontispiece (Hussey 89). Bell sees Woolf's primary source material as her observation of Pinka. Having spent her life among dogs, Woolf was not conventionally effusive in her behavior with them (Bell 409). She was thus well positioned to make respectful, informed, and unsentimental observations, and to deploy anthropomorphic comparisons and metaphors in a sophisticated way:

She was fascinated by all animals but her affection was odd and remote. She wanted to know what her dog was feeling.... Flush is not so much a book by a dog lover as a book by someone who would love to be a dog.... Her dog was the embodiment of her own spirit, not the pet of an owner. (Bell 410)

This empathetic identification and curiosity, undistorted by any narcissistic greed for adulation, informs Woolf's text.

The narrative begins with a disquisition on the origins of English spaniels, emphasizing that a cocker spaniel's very existence as such depends on the vagaries of human exploitation. This is highly pertinent to the position of purebred dogs in Victorian England, where the definition and segregation of canine breeds was bound up in the attempts of the rising middle class to define itself by maintaining strict distinctions of identity (Thurston 97-120). Woolf pointedly observes that human lineages are not so indisputably, physically apparent as those of dogs (16).

Woolf tries to imagine what the sensual impressions of Flush's puppyhood would have been. Walking with Miss Mitford in the countryside, "a variety of smells interwoven in subtlest combination thrilled his nostrils"; amidst this olfactory abundance he is overcome by "a smell sharper, stronger, more lacerating than any--a smell that ripped across his brain stirring a thousand instincts, releasing a million memories--the smell of hare, the smell of fox" (20). At this point Woolf's poetic recreation of a puppy's consciousness leads her to the same insight that Elizabeth Marshall Thomas arrived at after thousands of hours of observation--that human companions are not the center of a dog's psyche. In the excitement of his specifically canine experience of smell, Flush "forgot his mistress; he forgot all humankind" (20).

Woolf does not entirely omit Flush's sexuality from her catalogue of his early experience, though she couches it in elaborate metaphor and euphemism: "Love blazed her torch in his eyes; he heard the hunting horn of Venus" (21). It is true that this approach lacks the frankness of the later dog biographer J. R. Ackerley, who describes the sexual experience of the Alsatian bitch Tulip more directly: "She panted, they panted. Some were so exhausted by their efforts that they vomited, bringing up breakfast or lunch" (158). Woolf's approach is consistent with her reticence in writing about human physicality. Yet, within the confines of Victorian rhetoric, her language does succeed in conveying something about an imperative canine desire.

In addition to the frontispiece photograph purporting to show the book's subject, the first edition is illustrated with line drawings by Vanessa Bell emphasizing a canine perspective, along with contemporaneous portraits of Mrs. Browning and Miss Mitford (thus identified in the captions). When Miss Mitford presents Flush to her invalid friend Miss Barrett, his transfer of allegiance is presented with a less inhibited poetic empathy than his canine relationships. Suddenly aware that Miss Mitford has truly departed, leaving him in the strange surroundings of Wimpole Street, "the irrevocableness and implacability of fate so smote him, that he lifted up his head and howled aloud" (30). Accepting the condolences of Miss Barrett, Flush exchanges a "surprised" gaze with her:

There was a likeness between them. As they gazed at each other each felt: Here am I--and then each felt: But how different!... Broken asunder, yet made in the same mould, could it be that each completed what was dormant in the other? (31)

Here Woolf brings into question both the Cartesian divide and the putative simplicity of human-canine relationships. The promise of a Platonic completion of lost halves cannot be realized in this scene, however. This is dramatized in the moment's conclusion:

Between them lay the widest gulf that can separate one being from another. ... Thus closely united, thus immensely divided, they gazed at each other.

Their standoff is resolved, or at least accommodated, by Flush's taking up his new position at Miss Barrett's feet, "where he was to lie forever after." Their long gaze results in a revelation not of identity but of relationship.

Flush's companionship, as Miss Mitford had hoped, draws Miss Barrett out of her deep depression. Woolf's delineation of the gradual but decisive effect that Flush has on Miss Barrett is strikingly similar to accounts of the use of pets in psychotherapeutic treatments of hospital patients, nursing home residents, and prison inmates. (2) The constant companionship of Flush and Miss Barrett is not without its conflicts and limitations: "Sometimes the tie would almost break; there were vast gaps in their understanding" (44). If Flush cannot comprehend Miss Barrett's motivation in spending "hour after hour passing her hand over a white page with a black stick," the poet is unable to comprehend the dog's "alternate rages of lust and greed" at the scent of a passing bitch or a distant mutton-bone (44). Woolf scrupulously establishes that these gaps in understanding are mutual.

Assuming his position as guardian companion with great intensity; Flush refuses to leave Miss Barrett in her back bedroom, even to take a walk. Woolf squeamishly refrains from explaining how the physical difficulties that would arise from this situation are surmounted. Ackerley devotes an entire chapter to Tulip's "liquids and solids." Woolf's complete censorship of the subject represses one of the most constant concerns in any human-animal relationship--and one that must surely have been a major difficulty in the stuffy, overfurished back bedroom on Wimpole Street. Again, Woolf's cultural inhibitions in writing about the body limit her art.

Flush's jealousy of Robert Browning as he commences his courtship of Miss Barrett is dramatized not as an absurd comedy, but as a painful struggle toward understanding on Flush's part, not unlike Woolf's representations of human children confronted by adult relationships in such novels as To the Lighthouse and The Waves. Robert Browning's indifference in this struggle infuriates Flush. It ends with Flush belatedly consenting to eat cakes that Browning has brought him as a peace offering--an historical incident, which Woolf presents with quotations taken from the Browning letters (Flush 80). The cakes have become putrid during Flush's long stubborn refusal to eat them; swallowing his pride along with the pastry as he acknowledges defeat in the struggle for dominance, Flush contradicts Wittgenstein's theory that dogs cannot feel humiliation. That theory remains controversial in recent studies of canine behavior (Masson 102).

Flush's relations with other dogs are less complicated than his human entanglements, being untroubled by individual attachment. Flush does not bond with another dog, as he would if he were allowed to roam free. Woolf attempts to understand how Flush would make sense of the varieties of dogs he encounters during his guided walks in Wimpole Street: "Flush knew before the summer had passed that there is no equality among dogs" (40). He is aware of himself as a member of the elite, signaled by the treatment he receives from human beings, as well as by the hierarchical behavior patterns of other dogs.

Woolf vividly represents an obscure corner of Victorian history--the phenomenon of dognapping for ransom. This practice was facilitated by the proximity of privileged areas such as Wimpole Street to degraded slums such as Whitechapel. The historical Flush was stolen three times; Woolf acknowledges in an endnote that she compresses these incidents into one (175). Going against her father's wishes in paying Flush's ransom, Miss Barrett personally delivers the sum to the dognappers' headquarters in Whitechapel to ensure that it will arrive before Flush is killed. By putting her own life in jeopardy to save the life of her dog--one whom she has sometimes treated indifferently, not least in the incident that led to his dognapping--Miss Barrett discovers the fortitude that will later enable her to elope with Browning and find integrity as a human being.

For Flush, the effects of the dognapping are precisely those that scientifically or commercially exploited animals suffer under abusive conditions. Kept in a state of tortuous neglect for five days in a filthy cellar, Flush begins to lose his mind: "The racket, the hunger and the thirst, the reeking smells of the place ... were fast obliterating any clear image, any single desire" (96). As Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson argues, this is what Pavlov unintentionally demonstrated to be the result of such treatment in his experiments on dogs (183). Woolf gives Elizabeth Barrett's report of her reunion with Flush, following her intrepid efforts to free him: "He was not so enthusiastic about seeing me as I expected" (108). Delving into Flush's consciousness, Woolf supplies the reason for this unstereotypical behavior: "There was only one thing he wanted--clean water." The conventional human expectation of creatures who are created for our pleasure is unmasked here as a failure of human empathy.

In his last years, in Italy, Flush is allowed for the first time to live as a free-range dog. His relations with Mrs. Browning are "far less emotional now than in the old days," when they were cloistered together (125). Flush "embraces" other dogs, experiencing "what men can never know--love pure, love simple, love entire" (127). This freedom permits him to accept even the birth of the Brownings' son without being painfully afflicted with jealousy.

At the end of the narrative, in a passage that Woolf worried over and rewrote, Flush has a dream before he dies, recalling the incidents of his life. Woolf humbly describes his dream in the form of postulations. She suggests that a racial memory might emerge at the last: "Was he coursing up a hot hill-side with dark men shouting 'Span! Span!' as the rabbits darted from the brush?" (167). After happy memories of his puppyhood among the Mitfords, he is startled awake by a memory of intense terror among the dognappers of Whitechapel. (Again, Woolf phrases these descriptions as hypotheses only.) Flush jumps up, runs frantically, and dies. Notably absent from the dream are any memories of Flush's life with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, affirming that this book has not been simply a secondary biography of the poet. Must this scene be acknowledged as a sentimental conclusion? Dreams, of all psychological phenomena, imply not only a consciousness but a subconscious. Yet one point on which animal researchers agree is th at dogs dream; only the content of their dreams remains unknowable (Masson 114-16). Woolf's imagining of Flush's dream, written from the assumption that canine dreams like human ones emerge from a mixture of memory, anxiety, and desire, is as valid as any.

Yet the charge of sentimentality continues to dog this text. Initial critical response to Flush ranged from David Garnett's praise in the New Statesman to an unsigned attack in Granta, which condemned the book for being at once facile and popular (Hussey 89). In a youthfully arrogant statement which he later regretted, Christopher Isherwood dismissed Virginia Woolf as a politically uncommitted intellectual likely to write "a novel about the hopeless love of a Pekingese dog for a very beautiful maidenhair fern" (113). This preemptive ridicule occurs in a letter to Stephen Spender of 14 November 1932--one month before Woolf completed Flush. Spender would have been aware of Woolf's current project, and no doubt shared his information with Isherwood. This reception, growing out of what was thought and said about Woolf and her subject rather than from an examination of the text itself, would prove characteristic of the book's critical history. Down the decades since, the negative reaction has remained dominant eve n as the work's popularity has faded. By 1972, Quentin Bell could characterize Flush as "one of the least read of her novels" (409). Woolf's other parodic biography, Orlando--a work whose critical history has moved in the opposite direction--receives 19 columns of text and illustration in Mark Hussey's encyclopedic reference guide, Virginia Woolf A to Z; Flush receives three. Suiting the word to the deed, Hussey notes that "Flush has not received very much critical attention" (89).

Most studies of Woolf do not mention Flush. With perhaps a dozen exceptions in the vast Woolf literature, those studies that do acknowledge the book's existence grant it only a paragraph, a sentence, a clause, or a descriptive adjective. These persistently recurring adjectives--"sentimental," "minor," "trivial"--are disturbingly redolent of the terms by which women's writings were once dismissed as suitable subjects for critical study, and by which women's lives were dismissed as suitable subjects for biography.

Leonard Woolf reported that Flush was "a great success" in material terms: "The Hogarth Press sold 18,739 copies in the first six months and Harcourt, Brace 14,081 in America, where it was an alternative selection of The Book-of-the-Month Club" (144). But he went on to insist that the author "never took [the book] seriously," and became the first of many critics who would quote Virginia Woolf's own diary entry of 23 December 1932 as evidence against the artistic merit of the book she had just completed. In this entry Woolf expresses her fear that Flush was "too slight and too serious" (L.Woolf 151-52;V Woolf Diary 134).

In her letters and diaries, Woolf habitually expressed self-doubt about her writing--from her book reviews to her novels. She typically expressed impatience and dissatisfaction with her current project and eagerness to move on to her next one. It is dangerous to rely on these passages to confirm one's own assessment of a given text. Hermione Lee quotes Woolf's letter to John Lehmann of 3l July 1932--after the death of Lytton Strachey--in order to establish that the author dismissed her own book as a joke: "She went on with Flush. But it did not seem so much fun now, 'as I meant it for a joke with Lytton, and a skit on him"' (82). Lee omits Woolf's qualifying phrase about the potential of her ongoing project: "But I'll see" (Letters 83). It is true that Woolf also dismissed the book as "a joke on Lytton" in her letter to Ottoline Morrell of 23 February 1933 (Letters 161-62). Writing less defensively to correspondents whom she did not suspect of being hostile, however,Woolf took a different tone.

Thanking David Garnett on 8 October 1933 for his positive review of Flush, Woolf amends her earlier statements, specifying that the "joke with Lytton" referred only to "the last paragraph as originally written"--a parody of Strachey's imaginative recreation of the death of Queen Victoria, which Woolf cut before publication (Letters 23 1-32). Far from originating with Lee, the practice of selective quotation from the diaries and letters has become traditional in justifying the exclusion of Flush from the canon. Yet a similar justification could as easily be invoked to dismiss any book in Woolf's oeuvre.

Against Woolf's deprecatory private references to Flush must be set her unguarded response to a reader who grasped her serious intentions in writing the book. Replying to Sibyl Colefax on 22 October 1933, Woolf gives little indication that she considered this work to be a joke:

I'm so glad 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, and I was elated to heaven to think that you among the faithful firmly stood--or whatever Milton said. (Letters 236)

It is true that a good joke may be exhilarating, and it is gratifying when others catch the point of our jokes, especially when they are made professionally. But Woolf's exultant language in expressing her joy at being understood suggests a more serious artistic purpose in Flush--one that, her language in this letter implies, perhaps eluded Leonard Woolf, John Lehmann, and Ottoline Morrell. Her resort to Milton cannot but suggest a lofty design, even as her casual misquotation prevents the reference from becoming pompous. Woolf appears to conclude here that, in the response of a sensitive reader such as Lady Colefax, Flush is not "too serious" for its subject after all; nor, in its "hints and shades," is it too slight.

Almost universally excluded from the canon of Woolf's major works, Flush has not been critically evaluated as what it declares itself to be: the biography of a dog. Such scant academic attention as it has received attempts to redefine it as allegorized autobiography, an approach that only confirms the book's position as a marginal commentary on, recuperation from, or preparation for Woolf's "serious" fiction. About even these reclamations there persists a faint odor of professional embarrassment regarding Woolf's project. It is as if, in writing about a dog, Woolf were doing something not merely atypical but unworthy of a great writer--one, moreover, whose reputation bears the burden of proving that it is possible for a woman to be a great writer within the configuration of high modernism. Yet a sympathetic reading of Flush, taken on its own terms--as an intuitive, clear-eyed attempt to represent a nonhuman subject--reveals it to be one of Woolf's most original and forward-looking achievements.

In a note in Flush on Carlyle's dog Nero, Woolf called for a "treatise on canine psychology," one that might establish "whether it is possible to call one dog Elizabethan, another Augustan, another Victorian" (184). While denying that she had the space to undertake such a project, Woolf actually succeeded in making a substantial gesture toward crossing the gulf of understanding between human and nonhuman subjects, and toward understanding the relationship between the two.

Notes

(1.) For readings of Flush as anthropocentric feminist allegory, see DeSalvo, Eberly, Squier, and Vanita.

(2.) As an instance of Woolf's prescience, it is worth noting that this did not become a formal medical practice until 1964. See Serpell 89-107.

Works cited

Ackerley, J. R. My Dog Tulip. 1965. NewYork: Poseidon, 1987.

Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. Vol. 2. NewYork: Harcourt, 1972.

DeSalvo, Louise. Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work. New York: Balantine, 1990.

Eberly, David. "Housebroken: The Domesticated Relations in Flush. "Virginia Woolf: Texts and Contexts. Ed. Beth Rigel Daughtery and Eileen Barrett. New York: Pace UP, 1996. 21-25.

Griffin, Donald R. The Question of Animal Awareness: Evolutionary Continuity of Mental Experience. Rev. ed. Los Altos: Kaufaman, 1981.

Hussey, Mark. Virginia Woolf A to Z: A Comprehensive Reference for Students, Teachers, and Common Readers to Her Life, Work, and Critical Reception. New York: Oxford UP, 1996.

Isherwood, Christopher. Christopher and His Kind. New York: Farrar, 1976.

Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Knopf, 1997.

Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff. Dogs Never Lie About Love: Reflections on the Emotional World of Dogs. New York: Crown, 1997.

Serpell, James. In the Company of Animals: A Study of Human-Animal Relationships. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.

Squier, Susan M. Virginia Woolf and London: Sexual Politics of the City. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1985.

Thomas, Elizabeth Marshall. The Hidden Life of Dogs. Boston: Houghton, 1993.

Thurston, Mary Elizabeth. The Lost History of the Canine Race: Our 15,000-Year Love Affair with Dogs. Kansas City: Andrews, 1996.

Vanita, Ruth. "'Love Unspeakable': The Uses of Allusion in Flush." Virginia Woolf: Themes and Variations. Ed. Vara Neverow-Turk and Mark Hussey. New York: Pace UP, 1993.248-57.

Woolf, Leonard. Down hill All the Way:An Autobiography of the Years 1919 to 1939. NewYork: Harcourt, 1967.

Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNellie. Vol. 4. NewYork: Harcourt, 1982.

-----. Flush:A Biography. New York: Harcourt, 1933.

-----. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. Vol. 5. NewYork: Harcourt, 1979.

I wish to thank Dr. Anca Viasopolos for her guidance in the development of this essay.

Craig Smith is a doctoral candidate at Wayne State University. His dissertation is entitled Eustace Tilley's Closet: Gay and Lesbian Writers at The New Yorker, 1925-1992. His fiction has appeared in Christopher Street and in the anthology Discontents (ed. Dennis Cooper).

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