Tail of two cities

Virginia Woolf's story of a spaniel, set in London and Florence, is as much social comment as dog biography. In short, a veritable canine classic, says Justine Hankins

Virginia Woolf was known by those who loved her as Goat. Her sister, Vanessa Bell, was called Dolphin. Woolf gave animal aliases to all her friends, and grew up with a menagerie of creatures, including a squirrel, a marmoset and a mouse called Jacobi. Her first published essay was an obituary to the family's dog.

Little wonder, then, that she chose to pen a dog biography. While reading the love letters of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, Woolf found that "the figure of their dog made me laugh so I couldn't resist making him a Life". Flush, the dog in question, offered companionship to Barrett while she was confined to her sickbed in London, and was given a starring role in her correspondence. Flush was even eulogised in a slushy poem, To Flush, My Dog. Barrett, a self-confessed "philo-dogist", believed the spaniel to possess a remarkable intelligence and even the capacity for literacy. Flush could recognise the letters A and B, and it was only a matter of patience before he mastered the rest of the alphabet.

Reading skills aside, Flush was a close observer of Barrett's clandestine romance with Browning and their elopement to Italy. But he also had dramas of his own: he was kidnapped three times, a common fate at the time for London dogs of the genteel classes, and Barrett had to pay a heavy ransom.

Woolf had just completed The Waves when she was reading Barrett's letters, and she wrote Flush as light relief. (The book was also intended as a gentle leg-pulling of Lytton Strachey and his ground-breaking biography, Eminent Victorians.) Flush is the less talented sibling of Orlando, Woolf's magical parody of the 19th-century biography. In Orlando, Woolf plays with gender, space and time. In Flush, she inhabits a different species. "Flush, in other words, is a Woolf in dog's clothing," comments Alison Light in her introduction to the Penguin Classics edition.

Woolf was embarrassed by Flush, however, and worried that she would be dismissed as a "ladylike prattler". She said, "I shall very much dislike the popular success of Flush." The novel became her bestselling book to date, selling nearly 19,000 copies in the first six months, but even so Woolf must be content in the poets' corner of paradise, for it is now ignored by academics, is rarely mentioned on undergraduate courses and has been spared the indignity of a cinematic makeover.

Despite this polite neglect of Flush, it's not all fluff and slobbering. Not only a cutesy, cuddly dog biography, it also manages sharp, incisive social comment. We are told at length about the spaniel's ancestry, for example, which embraces Carthaginian legend, Basque lore and the palaces of the Tudors and Stuarts, while the birthright of the aristocracy becomes as arbitrary and ridiculous as the Kennel Club's breed standards. Flush is well aware of the Spaniel Club's ruling that "to be born with a light nose or a topknot is nothing less than fatal", and is as proud of his respectable lineage as any eminent Victorian.

In the confinement of Wimpole Street, Flush is a pampered pooch ever attentive at his mistress' sickbed. In Italy, both Flush and Elizabeth are transformed by their freedom from the tyranny of English social constraints. Flush is shocked to discover that all the dogs in Italy are mongrels: "Had the Kennel Club then no jurisdiction in Italy?" he wonders. But Flush "was becoming daily more democratic" - mongrels, it seems, have more fun. In Regent's Park, dogs must be on leads, but in Italy Flush runs free, enjoying the tastes and smells of Florence, and even having a love affair. Both dog and woman enjoy the release from the stultifying conventions of England. The sensual abandonment of the dog - "Goat and macaroni were raucous smells, crimson smells" - is echoed in Elizabeth's return to vigour and joy of life. "Elizabeth tossed off her Chianti and broke another orange from the branch" - and finally experiences the exuberance and relish that come so naturally to a dog.

Forget the experts - Flush is an afternoon's delight for dog-loving readers. It's wit and whimsy and sniffing, snuffling playfulness will amuse anyone who's ever known a spaniel. Woolf's literary underdog is a canine classic.