The novel, “Between the Acts,“ was Virginia Woolf’s final novel, and was published shortly after her death in 1941. The story has elements of a Shakespearean play with a sprinkling of a parody of a restoration comedy and ends with a panorama of Victorian triumph – and it is all set in just one day. Some critics believe that Woolf knew Between the Acts would be her swan song as a novelist as it is a pageant, but also an elegy. Not surprising to people who knew her, one of the novel’s characters was a dog,  “Sohrab,” an Afghan Hound she utilized to represent aspects of one of the book’s human characters.

Woolf was a dog owner who had many breeds in her life, but to our knowledge, she never owned an Afghan Hound. She’d had a terrier and a sheepdog, and when she married Leonard Woolf at the onset of World War I, they offered to keep a friend’s Clumber Spaniel named “Tinker” when his owner left to serve in the war.  Sadly, Tinker escaped from their garden and was lost,  never to be found despite their efforts to find him.

The most famous of Virginia Woolf’s own dogs was, “Pinka,” a purebred black Cocker Spaniel gifted to the couple by English poet, novelist, and garden designer, Vita Sackville-West, whose own Cocker Spaniel, “Pippin,” had had a litter of puppies.

Woolf would also become known for her an imaginative biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Cocker Spaniel, “Flush,” a blend of fiction and nonfiction that was published in 1933.

Image of Virginia Woolf and Pinka