Daisy and Woolf

Mina, a writer of mixed ancestry, discovers the unfinished story of Eurasian woman Daisy Simmons in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. She travels to different countries to write Daisy's story, navigating cultural and race barriers while dealing with the remains of her own life. The novel explores themes of race, class, and privilege and highlights the importance of Own Voices writing. Cahill's writing is praised for its elegance, ambition, and exploration of important issues.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 304 pages
Publication date: 24 November 2022
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

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. Traveling 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 u.

Weight: 376g
Dimension: 153 x 234 x 24 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780349137827