Virginia Woolf s biography of Elizabeth Barrett Brownings spaniel was what she called a little escapade , begun to ease my brain in the wake of The Waves (1931). The intensities of that most demanding fiction were soon supplanted by canine psychology and the art of anthropomorphism. For all its fun and frivolity, Flush is none the less a work seriously inclined to mock and question the genre of biography, as did Woolf s earlier, more ambitious, and more widely read jeu d esprit, Orlando