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''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)
Notes
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Author's note: for Taron and for Sarah
Epigraph: 'A woman writing thinks back through her mother' - Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Other Formats
- Large print.
Works about this Work
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Daisy & Woolf by Michelle Cahill (Review)
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: Antipodes , vol. 36 no. 1 2023; (p. 171-172)
— Review of Daisy and Woolf 2022 single work novel'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)
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For There She Is, Out of the Shadow
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , May 2023;
— Review of Daisy and Woolf 2022 single work novel'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)
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Anne Brewster Reviews Daisy and Woolf by Michelle Cahill
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: Mascara Literary Review , no. 28 2022; Mascara Literary Review , no. 29 2023;
— Review of Daisy and Woolf 2022 single work novel'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)
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Alicia Marsden in Conversation with Michelle Cahill
Alicia Marsden
(interviewer),
2022
single work
interview
— Appears in: Mascara Literary Review , no. 28 2022; -
Michelle Cahill, Daisy & Woolf
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: JASAL , December vol. 22 no. 2 2022;
— Review of Daisy and Woolf 2022 single work novel 'Michelle Cahill’s Daisy & Woolf is a novel that centres on Daisy Simmons, the “dark, adorably pretty” marginal character with whom Peter Walsh declares himself in love in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (Woolf 172). The story unfolds via a compilation of letters and diary-entry-style chapters shifting between the 1920s (Daisy’s experiences) and the late 2010s—where writer Mina reflects on the process of telling Daisy’s story. First and foremost, Daisy & Woolf is interested in examining and challenging “Anglo-centric histories and fictions” through its engagement with Woolf’s novel and characters, but much like its characters, the story roams far beyond this central focus in numerous directions. Cahill ruminates on writing and publishing, sexuality, gender, motherhood, technology, the passage of time and mental health—a list that overlaps significantly with the concerns of Woolf’s work (see Showalter).' (Introduction)
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Michelle Cahill : Daisy and Woolf
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: The Saturday Paper , 14-20 May 2022;
— Review of Daisy and Woolf 2022 single work novel -
The Best New Books Released in May as Selected by Avid Readers and Critics
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: ABC News [Online] , May 2022;
— Review of Losing Face 2022 single work novel ; Daisy and Woolf 2022 single work novel ; An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life 2022 selected work short story ; The Jaguar 2022 selected work poetry -
[Review] Daisy and Woolf
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: Kalliope X , Autumn no. 2 2022;
— Review of Daisy and Woolf 2022 single work novel'‘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)
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Books Roundup
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: Kill Your Darlings [Online] , May 2022;
— Review of How to Be Between 2022 single work autobiography ; Root and Branch : Essays on Inheritance 2022 selected work essay ; Daisy and Woolf 2022 single work novel ; Abomination 2022 single work novel -
Delible Impressions : Liberating Daisy Simmons
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , July no. 444 2022; (p. 38)
— Review of Daisy and Woolf 2022 single work novel'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)
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In Daisy & Woolf, Michelle Cahill Revisits a Modernist Classic to Write a Story of Her Own
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: The Conversation , 30 May 2022;'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.”'
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Alicia Marsden in Conversation with Michelle Cahill
Alicia Marsden
(interviewer),
2022
single work
interview
— Appears in: Mascara Literary Review , no. 28 2022;
Awards
- 2023 longlisted Voss Literary Prize
- 2023 longlisted ASAL Awards — ALS Gold Medal
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cAustralia,c
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cEngland,ccUnited Kingdom (UK),cWestern Europe, Europe,
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cIndia,cSouth Asia, South and East Asia, Asia,
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cChina,cEast Asia, South and East Asia, Asia,