''This is where I begin. This blank page draws me nearer to you, the day sweltering, my courage quickens, the curtains billowing and the punkah swaying, the punkah rattling as I sit at my writing bureau ... it is a soothing sound.'
'Mina, a writer, is navigating her place in the world, balancing creativity, academia, her sexuality and the expectation that a wife and mother abandons herself for others. For her, like so many women of mixed ancestry, it is too easy to be erased. But her fire and intellect refuse to bow. She discovers 'the dark, adorable' Eurasian woman Daisy Simmons, whom Peter Walsh plans to marry in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. Daisy disappeared from Woolf's pages, her story unfinished - never given a voice in the novel, nor a footnote in any of the admiring Woolf scholarship that followed.
While dealing with the remains of another life, Mina decides to write Daisy's story. Travelling from Australia to England, India and China, freelancing and researching, she has to navigate cultural and race barriers, trying hard not to look back or flinch at the personal cost. Like Woolf, her writing both sustains and overwhelms her. But in releasing Daisy from her fictional destiny, Mina finds the stubbornness and strength to also break free.' (Publication summary)
Epigraph: 'A woman writing thinks back through her mother' - Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own.
'Daisy & Woolf is a novel that will inevitably elicit comparisons to Michael Cunningham's The Hours for its fictional engagement with Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. But Cahill's novel very much stands on its own and is worthy of admiration for its handling of complex histories, its deeply woven intertextualities, and its presentation of Daisy, Woolf's minor character, as fully fleshed and realized.' (Introduction)
'It is difficult to overvalue the currency of modernism right now. Over the last decade, a plethora of scholarly writers have addressed modernism’s imperial legacies and in so doing have extended its geographic and temporal boundaries. Contemporary writers such as Tom McCarthy, Zadie Smith, Sophie Cunningham and Jack Cox have also engaged in varied ways with modernism’s aesthetic and revolutionary bequests. Michelle Cahill’s debut novel, Daisy & Woolf, is preoccupied with Virginia Woolf’s portrayal of a Eurasian character, Daisy Simmons, in Mrs Dalloway. ' (Introduction)
'Pulling characters from the margins to the fore: an elegant meditation on race, class and privilege.'
'Michelle Cahill’s debut novel Daisy & Woolf is accomplished and exhilarating. A re-reading of Virginia Woolf’s iconic modernist novel Mrs Dalloway, it excavates and reconstructs the literary worlding of a minor character, Daisy Simmons – the ‘dark, adorable’ Eurasian woman that Clarissa Dalloway’s longtime admirer, Peter Walsh, plans to marry. If you are thinking about the coupling of Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre you are on the right track.' (Introduction)
'‘I did not know the dead could speak until today, when I received a letter from my mother.’ So begins Michelle Cahill’s first novel, Daisy & Woolf, an ambitious work that embraces many themes: motherhood and daughterhood, grief and guilt, sexuality and power, connection, space and time, class and colonialism.' (Introduction)
'Daisy Simmons – twenty-four years old, the wife of a major in the Indian Army, mother of two children, ‘dark [and] adorably pretty’ – is an ephemeral presence in Virginia Woolf’s fourth novel, Mrs Dalloway (1925). Clarissa Dalloway’s former lover, Peter Walsh, has travelled to London from India to secure a divorce so that he might marry Daisy. From a mere handful of references, we are able to glean the wavering nature of Peter’s devotion to Daisy and his suspicion that she will, as Woolf writes, ‘look ordinary beside Clarissa’.' (Introduction)
'Michelle Cahill’s Daisy & Woolf takes its epigraph and its inspiration from Virginia Woolf’s feminist essay A Room of One’s Own (1929): “A woman writing thinks back through her mothers.”'
