“Was it Flush, or was it Pan?”

When conceiving of Flush: A Biography, Virginia Woolf initially intended to include a note at the end of the text detailing her "painful necessity of drawing upon her imagination" in writing the life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel while relying on a "very meagre list of authorities". This chapter presents Flush alongside a lesser known animal biography that was familiar to Woolf, namely Inordinate Affection: A Story for Dog Lovers by composer, memoirist, and suffragette Ethel Smyth. There is an allusion embedded in the intimate encounter between woman and dog in the question "Was it Flush, or was it Pan?" Ethel Smyth’s most beloved sheepdog was named Pan IV, and he was firmly part of her household by the time she first met Woolf in February 1930. Woolf’s emphasis on the way that desired physiology and behaviors dictate which dogs are bred from connects her canine politics to her critique of fascism and eugenics.