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Posts Tagged ‘Flush’

Recently I revisited an old post about The Lost Garden, a moving homage to Virginia Woolf. I’ve read almost everything Helen Humphreys has written and was delighted with her most recent work, And a Dog Called Fig. A memoir, subtitled Solitude, Connection, the Writing Life, it weaves her life and writing with the dogs who have shared her journey, including the incumbent, a vizsla named Fig.

Lacking a college education, Humphreys relied on reading literature, starting alphabetically until “impatient with my methodical approach, I skipped ahead to W so that I could read Virginia Woolf.”

Woolf as model

Woolf became her model when she started writing: “I followed Woolf’s example of how to live a writing day—working in the morning, walking in the afternoon, writing letters or listening to music in the evenings.”

Humphreys always had dogs, and Woolf too had dogs to accompany her on her walks as well as to stimulate her work. First Grizzle, who was memorialized in her story “Gipsy, the Mongrel,” then Pinka, who graced the cover of her novel Flush.

Their respective dogs connected Humphreys more closely to Woolf:  “When I can recognize the look in Virginia Woolf’s dog’s eyes as being a look I have seen on my own dog … I can imagine her interactions with Grizzle as being similar to some of my interactions with Charlotte [Fig’s predecessor, also a vizsla].”

Writers whose dogs were prominent

Emily Bronte, Gertrude Stein, Agatha Christie, and Zora Neale Hurston are among the writers Humphreys cites whose dogs were prominent in their lives.

She thinks these bonds are significant:

“Structure in a novel, and in life, is the perfect balance of order and chaos. The structure of a day could be the four dog walks undertaken at regular intervals.” She constructed her novel Wild Dogs after “the way that a dog turns and turns before settling down to sleep … I wanted the story to turn like that, to circle back on itself and then continue again before coming to rest.”

Humphreys relates the joys and lessons she found in her lifetime with dogs, about discipline and patience, loneliness and grief, communion and communication, and ponders near the end: “Do they make us better, or do they simply return us to who we are?”

More on Woolf and dogs

For more on this topic, see our post on Shaggy Muses: The Dogs Who Inspired Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edith Wharton and Emily Bronte.

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It’s National Dog Day. And of course there are ties-in to Virginia Woolf.

Number one: She had dogs. Number two: She wrote a book about a dog — Flush (1933), told from the perspective of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel.

As children, Virginia and the other Stephen siblings had a gray shaggy terrier named Shag, which was sent by train to Talland House, their summer home in St. Ives, Cornwall to help catch rats.

A new puppy, Jerry, was later added to the family mix. Still later, a sheep-dog pup without a tail named Gurth, after a character in Ivanhoe. Woolf grew attached to Gurth, even though he was her sister Vanessa’s dog, and remained attached to him, even after she and her siblings moved to 46 Gordon Square.

After Vanessa married Clive Bell and moved nearby, Virginia and brother Adiran felt the need to have their own dog. So they visited Battersea Lost Dogs Home and adopted a Boxer named Hans, who Virginia taught to put out matches after she used them to light her cigarettes, a trick she taught all her dogs after Hans.

At the onset of World War I and after Virginia married Leonard Woolf (1912), the couple offered to keep a friend’s Clumber Spaniel named Tinker when he left to serve in the war. Tinker, though, escaped from their garden and was lost. He was not found, despite the Woolfs’ fervent efforts to locate.

In 1919, they added a mixed breed terrier named Grizzle to their home in Rodmell, Monk’s House, and the canine accompanied Virginia on her walks over the Sussex downs.

Perhaps the most famous of Virginia Woolf’s dogs is Pinka, the purebred black Cocker Spaniel from a litter born to Pippin, Vita Sackville-West’s Cocker Spaniel. Pinka was a gift to the Woolfs from Vita.

For an entire chapter on the Woolfs and their dogs, take a look at Shaggy Muses by Maureen Adams.

You’ll call this sentimental—perhaps—but then a dog somehow represents the private side of life, the play side. – Virginia Woolf

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Vanessa Bell, Horatio Brown, Julia Duckworth Stephen, Thoby Stephen, Virginia Woolf, George Duckworth, Adrian Stephen, Gerald Duckworth and the family dog Shag in 1892.

Pinka

Virginia Woolf and Pinka

Flush

The cover of Virginia Woolf’s 1933 novel “Flush: A Biography,” which included original drawings by Vanessa Bell.

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Inspired by her own trip from London to Greece with her spaniel, Virginia Woolf fan and Masters student Katyuli Lloyd has crafted new illustrations for Woolf’s Flush (1933).

Screenshot of her sketchbook for Flush.

Screenshot of Lloyd’s sketchbook for Flush, as posted on her website.

Her version uses four-color lithographs and black ink sketches to illustrate Woolf’s story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel. The project is part of her Masters in Children’s Book Illustration at the  Cambridge School of Art.

Layering of colors played a key role in the project, Lloyd said. “I knew that my choice of colours would be key to bringing the book to life. The added challenge was to find a colour scheme that could work for contrasting environments: a dark Victorian interior and the outdoor light of Italy.”

I first read the novel when I had taken my own spaniel from London to Greece. I was inspired by my experiences mirroring those of someone 170 years ago: the timelessness in the relationship between an owner and their dog, as well as the love of travel. -Katyuli Lloyd

Her two major Masters projects are the Flush illustrations and a rewrite of Nikolai Gogol’s Nose for 7-9 years olds in rhyming couplets, with illustrations.

An exhibition of her work will be held at the Candid Arts Trust Gallery, 3–5 Torrens Street, London EC1V, Feb. 9-13, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

I was keen for my finished artwork to have a hand-printed quality. I liked the grainy, faded lithograph prints of the 1920s and 1930s, including those of Vanessa Bell for Hogarth Press, and I wanted my artwork to nod to Woolf’s hand-printed books. – Lloyd

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FlushCasting is underway for Flush, the film version of Virginia Woolf’s novel about Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning as told through the eyes of Barrett’s cocker spaniel, Flush.

It is a co-production with Robbie Little and Ellen Little of The Little Film Company. Diarmuid Lawrence will direct the late autumn shoot.

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Here is some news via the Facebook page of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain:

The RateMyWords Virginia Woolf Competition has awarded first prize and £200 to Gabriella Patanè for her story “The Pawmark on the Page,” a tribute to Virginia Woolf. Here is her opening line:

‘Perhaps it was the end of September 1930 that Virginia Woolf first saw the pawmark on the page.’

Here’s the original from Woolf’s “The Mark on the Wall”:

‘Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall.’

According to the society, Gabriella’s story combines ‘The Mark on the Wall’ with Flush, featuring Pinker theFlush spaniel, the real-life model for Flush, given to Virginia by Vita Sackville-West. Virginia and Leonard are included in the story, and even Nelly gets a namecheck.

Read the full story.

RateMyWords also made a generous donation to the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain.

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