First edition. Demy 8vo. Pp. 163, [1, blank]. Publisher's pale buff cloth, lettered in gilt to spine. Illustrated with a portrait frontispiece and nine further plates, including four line drawings by Vanessa Bell. Cream dustwrapper, printed in brown with pictorial illustration of author's cocker spaniel 'Pinka,' a stand-in for Elizabeth Barrett Browning's adored canine 'Flush' (priced at 7s. 6d. net to spine and front). 'Large Paper' copy, being the only edition published. Preceded by serialization in the July to October 1933 issues of The Atlantic Monthly. Issued on 5 October, 1933, in an edition of 12,680 copies. A second impression of 3,000 copies followed later in the same month, with the third to fifth printings issued as the 'Uniform Edition'.
A couple of closed tears and tiny nicks to crown of dustwrapper spine, else Fine. Contents crisp and clean.
"I lay in the garden and read the Browning love letters, and the figure of their dog made me laugh so I couldn't resist making him a Life." Woolf's fictional biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's cocker spaniel was what she called 'a little escapade', begun to ease her brain after the strain of the emotionally draining The Waves (1931). 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 (1928). "[A] little masterpiece of comedy." –Times Literary Supplement
[The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. V. p.161–2; Kirkpatrick and Clarke A19a & C338; Woolmer 334]