'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.
About the Author
Michelle Cahill is the author of fiction, essays and three collections of poetry, including Vishvarupa, which was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Literary Award, and
Letter to Pessoa, a short-story collection that won a 2017 NSW Premier's Literary Award (Glenda Adams Award) and was shortlisted for the 2017 Steele Rudd Queensland Literary Award. Born in Kenya, she attended primary school in London before migrating to Australia.
She lives in Sydney, where she graduated in Medicine and Arts. She is editor of the online literary magazine
Mascara and co-editor of the anthology
Contemporary Asian Australian Poets. Michelle was awarded the 2020 Red Room Poetry Fellowship. Her short story
'Duende' won the 2014 Hilary Mantel International Short Story Award and 'Borges and I' was shortlisted in the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Prize.
Industry Reviews
Written with an essayist's precision and a poet's grace, Daisy and Woolf is a clever, lyrical, and moving meditation on the novelist's responsibility. It is a profound comment on the stories we choose to tell, and the gaps in our choosing. Meticulously rendering Virginia Woolf's faintly sketched, sidelined characters in full vibrant colour, Cahill's sweeping novel traverses centuries, cultures and continents, to deftly explore how race, gender and class have the power to shape a narrative. - Maxine Beneba Clarke
