Daisy & Woolf

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Author: Michelle Cahill
Published Date: 12/01/2025
Paperback: Paperback with gatefold
Pages: 242

Description

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.

A singular achievement. Michelle Cahill deploys poetry and history in the most powerful manner possible to write back to Virginia Woolf, and expose the colonial gaze that did not, (does not) acknowledge the full humanity of others. This novel will be to Mrs Dalloway what Wide Sargasso Sea was to Jane Eyre. — Meena Kandasamy (shortlisted in The Womens’ Prize)

By centring Daisy, one of Woolf’s peripheral characters in Mrs Dalloway and giving her a fully realised life and history, Cahill demonstrates how the present phenomena of global migration, quarantine, and the social pandemics of racism, sexism, and economic precariousness were also present in the 1920s. At once critically acute and narratively rich, Daisy & Woolf shows us that there are always new ways to read the past in order to understand the present. — Patrick Flanery

In luminous prose, she has brought an old world back to life. Her background as a poet is clear in her evocative and detailed descriptions of colonial India. Daisy’s voice is perfectly tuned and her story is compelling and surprisingly relevant for a contemporary audience. — Melanie Cheng

Praise for Letter to Pessoa

Line by line Cahill’s writing is musical, assured. Cumulatively, her seriousness it evident, her ambition impressive. — Hilary Mantel

Michelle Cahill is an Indian Australian author of prize-winning fiction and three collections of poetry. She was awarded the KWS Hilary Mantel International Short Story Prize judged by Hilary Mantel. Her debut fiction, Letter to Pessoa won the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing. Vishvarūpa was shortlisted in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. She has been awarded residencies at Sangam House in Bangalore, Sanskriti Kendra, New Delhi, a Hawthornden Castle Fellowship and the Hedberg Residency at the University of Tasmania.