Based on a lecture given at Girton College, Cambridge, this title is one of the feminist polemics, ranging in its themes from Jane Austen and Carlotte Bronte, and the effects of poverty and sexual constraint on female creativity. It justifies the need for women to possess intellectual freedom and financial independence.

Flush was an English cocker spaniel who belonged to the nineteenth-century poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Virginia Woolf learned of him from the love letters Elizabeth wrote to her future husband, fellow poet Robert Browning, and found ‘the figure of their dog made me laugh so, I couldn't resist making him a Life.’ The resulting ‘biography’ combines sensuous imaginative description with sharp social comment, and brings Woolf’s unsentimental humour and insight to the fore. We see F...