'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. 'An elegant meditation on race, class and privilege ...
Daisy and Woolf not only brings us stories of brave, clever women
in an eloquent way, it also leaves questions for us readers to
think of our own trajectory of reading and influences' ArtsHub
'Cahill writes beautifully ... Daisy and Woolf is a novel about
reclamation. Highlighting the inadvertent racism inherent in much
of the classical literary canon, it reinforces the the importance
of Own Voices writing, and shines a light on the lives of people of
colour that cannot be understood or expressed without their input'
The Age 'an impressive, ambitious postmodern novel that raises
questions around race, class, feminism, Empire, the post-colonial
voice and so much more ... a fascinating work, it's rare to see
something of its kind in the Australian literary landscape'
Readings PRAISE FOR MICHELLE CAHILL: 'Her deftness and linguistic
grace masks her purpose, till she reveals a shocking glimpse of the
price that art can exact' - HILARY MANTEL 'Traverses centuries,
cultures and continents to deftly explore how race, gender and
class have the power to shape a narrative' - MAXINE BENEBA CLARKE
'A dauntless novel of empire, and its ever-replicating costs. There
are echoes of Michael Ondaatje in this novel's lush and observant
prose-craft. This is fiction at its most human and humane' - BEEJAY
SILCOX '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' - MELANIE CHENG 'At once
critically acute and narratively rich, Daisy and Woolf shows us
that there are always new ways to read the past in order to
understand the present' - PATRICK FLANERY '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
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