Every month a group of willing and hungry readers gather to discuss a new book, have a nice chat and practice their English. New members are welcome!

This month's book of choice is Flush by Virginia Woolf (1933).

Virginia Woolf's Flush, published in 1933, is a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's spaniel, who lived from 1840-54. Its direct inspiration was a new edition, in 1930, of the Brownings' love letters in which 'the figure of their dog made me laugh so I couldn't resist making him a Life.'
Although ostensibly a book about the taming of a pedigree dog, Flush addresses the way society tames and classifies woman', indeed not just tames them but imprisons them: Flush is imprisoned by Taylor, the notorious London dog stealer, and Elizabeth is imprisoned by her father. 
Flush is also an exploration of concepts of 'breeding'; Virginia Woolf shows that 'the classifications of Debrett are as absurd and pernicious' as those of the Kennel Club that lead Flush to look up to greyhounds but down on mongrels. 'When we ask what constitutes noble birth,' says Virginia Woolf, 'should our eyes be light or dark, our ears curled our judges merely refer us to our coats of arms. You have none perhaps. Then you are nobody.'
Most people, however, will read Flush simply as a delightful and unique classic, an unusual and extraordinary book by one of our greatest writers; it is, as well, perhaps the most wonderful book about a dog ever written and, as the Times Literary Supplement wrote thirty years after its first publication, 'a triumph of the creative imagination and a little masterpiece of comedy.'

Virginia Woolf is now recognized as a major twentieth-century author, a great novelist and essayist and a key figure in literary history as a feminist and a modernist. Her first novel, The Voyage Out, appeared in 1915, and she then worked through the transitional Night and Day (1919) to the highly experimental and impressionistic Jacob's Room (1922). From then on her fiction became a series of brilliant and extraordinarily varied experiments, each one searching for a fresh way of presenting the relationship between individual lives and the forces of society and history. She was particularly concerned with women's experience, not only in her novels but also in her essays and her two books of feminist polemic, A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938). Her major novels include Mrs Dalloway (1925), the historical fantasy Orlando (1928), written for Vita Sackville-West, the extraordinarily poetic vision of The Waves (1931), the family saga of The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941). All these are published by Penguin, as are her Diaries, Volumes I-V, and selections from her essays and short stories.