Daisy & Woolf

by Michelle Cahill

'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.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, 21st Century

304 pages, Paperback

Published April 27, 2022

About the author

Michelle Cahill is of Indian heritage and lives in Sydney. Her short stories Letter to Pessoa (Giramondo, 2016) won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for New Writing and was on several shortlists. Her novel Daisy and Woolf (Hachette, 2022) was longlisted for the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal and the Voss Literary Prize. She is a Hedberg Writer in Residence at the University of Tasmania.

Reviews

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

There she is, after all, unfairly cooped up in Virginia Woolf's novel, without so much as an alcove of interior space to move about it, to express her ecstasy or vent her grief.

This is an intelligent and contemporary meditation on how colonialism has distorted and erased not just narratives of history but has also worked to produce what Cahill terms 'the first world bias in books'.

Taking Daisy, the 'dark' Anglo-Indian woman mentioned briefly in Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Cahill excavates a place for her subjectivity that was withheld by Woolf's novel. At the same time, the itinerant novelist/narrator named Mina struggles with her own complicated heritage and status and offers up a commentary on her writing of Daisy's story as she moves restlessly between Australia, India, London and China.

The book cleverly echoes Woolf in multiple ways not just fashioning stories for Daisy herself and Lucrezia (the Italian wife of Septimus Warren Smith from Mrs Dalloway) but in the polyphony of voices (cf. The Waves) and the sea voyage as Daisy travels from India to England (cf. The Voyage Out for a different journey).

But this book goes beyond the prequel/sequel model of Wide Sargasso Sea. Mina's loose, but never baggy, narrative embraces wider concerns: the loss of a mother and the constrictions of motherhood, desire and sexuality, the precarious gig economy shared with so many young academics and writers, the 'invisible ink' of categories like 'Eurasian' and 'Anglo-Indian' coined by colonialism, the early feminism of Woolf's generation and the brutal misogyny that we are now talking about. This broadening of the agenda could have been messy and it's to Cahill's credit that it's not: it's inclusive and light-touch on the connections that can be drawn between the ways all these structures of power are sustained.

Not least, this book offers a nuanced way of thinking about how we read Woolf in the twenty-first century: 'Am I with Virginia Woolf or am I against her? Her repertoire of choices cast from privilege is bound to exceed mine, and yet I think I am more on her side... True, she stands for the establishment, she is the darling, the doyen of British feminism, yet she is also a site of experimentation and cultural questioning, subverting the idea of what self is, the gender binary and the patriarchy'.

I have to say that the cover of this book is unfortunate as it implies a more romantic and sort of sepia-tinted, rose-encrusted story than anything Cahill must have conceived, and the book itself is far more robust, intellectually-inflected and confrontational.

In the end, what I especially loved is that it remains, to some extent, open and unfinished, though not in an unsatisfying way. As the novel implies, this story is still being written.

[Marie Antoine · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book. I've been studying Virginia Woolf and her work Mrs Dalloway and also read "The Hours" by Cunningham, which I enjoyed very much.
However, this book couldn't get a hold of me at any point. Cahill tries to capture the character Daisy from the novel Mrs Dalloway by letting her protagonist Mina go on a journey around the world in order to do the Eurasian heritage of Daisy justice.
I actually can't put my finger on what bothered me so much while reading. Why I found it so dreadful to pick this novel up. Maybe Cahill's writing style just isn't my thing, I don't know.
If anybody wants to read this book nonetheless, you need to have quite some knowledge about Mrs Dalloway and Virginia Woolf to understand the plot.

[Magdalena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Writing through a literary icon like Virginia Woolf is no small undertaking. Such a canonical pressure might overwhelm many a novelist, but Michelle Cahill has managed it perfectly. Daisy & Woolf is a rich, complex book that blurs binaries and boundaries, provoking big questions around art, parenting, love, privilege, colonisation, and creativity.The narrative flows quickly, driven by its dual protagonists, with the book unfolding its denser meaning later, in the shared collaborative space between reader and writer:

Writing is like scouring time, sketching patterns from correspondences, a kind of oracle. Cutting velvet, twisting threads, all the things that cannot be deciphered and have no substitute like pieces of shimmering glass.  Birth and death rammed into each other.  Deep, deep in my grief, I am the broken sky searching for the words as the light falls. (77)

Mina Waters is an Anglo-Indian Australian writer temporarily in London to write the story of Daisy Simmons, a minor character and the love interest of Mrs Dalloway's Peter Walsh. In Mrs Dalloway, Peter is a somewhat unattractive character, prone to emotional displays, jealous of Daisy’s husband and keen for her to divorce her husband and come to England to marry him, only to lose interest when she arrives. His attitude towards India is patronising and his objectification of Daisy suspect, but Woolf does little to tease these issues out, or the self-aware classism inherent in Clarissa Dalloway's attitude towards Miss Killman with her old Macintosh and the unemployable Peter who cannot stop playing with his knife. Daisy & Woolf engages deeply with these issues along with the exploitations that are part of the spaces that Mina and Daisy inhabit, though always subtly, always expertly woven into the story: 

We in the West are accustomed to brushing off our complicity and our guilt at the crimes of poverty, injustice, exploitation.  Nothing much on paper, nothing in the history books, the official records, just the smoke of words, the daily crossings of pedestrians through parks, the vomit-stained paving stones of the Royal Borough. (141)

Cahill handles Mrs Dalloway beautifully, engaging openly with its issues while also paying homage to Woolf’s writing skills, utilising multiple layers of stories of colonisation both at the height of the British Empire in India and its legacy post-empire. Lucrezia is another minor non-English Woolf character who comes alive in Daisy & Woolf, her marginalisation pivoting as she returns to Italy and changes the course of Daisy's life. 

Mina’s own story is engaging as she works to manage her dwindling grant money and the necessity of jugging ongoing paid work in academia with her difficult novel, a needy child back home, grief at her mother’s recent death, and her own sexual desires against a forbidding canon. Mina’s work takes her to and from Australia and London, New York, India and China, with Mina's travels and personal struggles mirroring those of Daisy's. 

Daisy’s story is written primarily in epistolary, letters drawing the reader in as confidante to her insecurities, her growing sense of self, and her relationships. There is a direct connection between Daisy's world in 1924 and Mina's in 2017 that dissolves the time gap since both are happening in the same present, an entanglement which Cahill handles with poetic grace:

When I close my eyes at night, after such a seemingly endless day at sea, I see nothing but the undulations of shagreen, rhythmic and glittering blue, hear the sounds of slapping against the prow and fish gasping.  Then it become a kind of opaqueness, divested of detail before the darkness of sleep gathers and dreams entangle me ordering their fragments into spurious clusters that nevertheless carry their own murmurings of destiny. (113)

There’s no jarring transition between the “real world” of Mina, the fictive world of Daisy’s story or Mrs Dalloway as the referent. Cahill creates threads that link these three 'texts' perfectly, so that it feels as though they are all one seamless story, paralleled in time and space. The dramatic irony is that both Daisy and Mina are equally fictional, creating a metafictional aspect to the work.  Cahill does a wonderful job of not only reckoning with the difficult questions that come out of Mrs Dalloway, Woolf’s diaries and other material of the time including Woolf’s nephew Julian Bell's affair with writer and academic Shuhua in China, but also picking up some of the more sumptuous aspects of Woolf’s writing.  There is a cadence here, an interiority and a poetry which pays homage to Woolf’s style:

Like wind gusting through Gordon Square. Or like waves breaking, nearest to the shore while at the same time from a farther current, the sea sucks and swirls in pools of rocks, each break overlapping the last, till the ocean’s ink becomes a hammer, striking, smashing, throbbing against the sand, and a wave drumming upon the ear’s membrane, against the page: this is how writing happens. (168)

A basic familiarity with Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway will certainly increase the resonance, and there is much pleasure to be had from the correspondences with that text, but it’s not mandatory. Cahill provides a complete story for Daisy and Mina and many of the key questions that come out of this book stand alone, as does the sheer beauty of its narration. Daisy & Woolf is a wonderful debut, and one which doesn’t shy away from contradiction even as it draws the reader into its deeply compelling narrative. 

[Ali · Rating 3 out of 5]

The concepts and ideas in this one are really great. Cahill creates a story for Daisy, a character who lacks one in Mrs Dalloway, and uses it to strip back whose stories do and don't get space. Unfortunately, the execution didn't work for me. Daisy's voice is alive and compelling, but the other voices here - including the modern day story of Mina, who appears distractingly as an author stand-in - don't work as well. The story has the same focus on storytelling from the interior of the modernist writings, but replaces the slightly frenetic energy of Woolf with a much more reflective and almost languid pace, which did little to engage me with the characters.

[Hermien · Rating 1 out of 5]

By the end of the book I thoroughly disliked Mina, the fictional writer of the book, and lost track of all the chips on her shoulder. Daisy's (a minor character in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway) journal entries and letters from her and other people written in the 1920's made it worth finishing the book although they didn't lead to much in the end either.

[Caren · Rating 1 out of 5]

I persevered through Cahill's novel rather than enjoyed it, despite being well-prepared, having reread Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway" to reacquaint myself with Daisy, the Eurasian woman whose story is only a voiceless shadow in Woolf's novel. Cahill's intention was to tell Daisy's story through a 2nd narrative - resulting in a back and forth jump between Mina's recording of her struggle with writing in 2017-18, an attempt to bring to light those who are pushed to the margins of "Anglo-centric histories and fictions", and Daisy's perceptions and experiences in 1924, leaving India to join her lover in England. For me, what resulted was a confusing and overwritten series of entries, through which I failed to connect to either of the women.

I understand that Cahill had lofty ambitions to write about the process of writing itself, about class and culture, and about hidden and overt biases in telling the stories of the marginalised, about Mina's/Cahill's "life as a writer of colour. Unfortunately, I was not moved by either the characters or their melodramatic experiences.

[VinitaF · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a first book this one is quite good. Cahill can more than handle the craft and writes with a poetic fluency that creates vivid images. The voice of Daisy is well rounded and set perfectly in its era. The modern day voice in her other narrative whilst also good probably uses a few too many references to its time as a backdrop to make it believable. I had not read Mrs Dalloway prior to reading this book but will do so now.
Great commentary on racism and the voice that more women of colour need.

[Alice · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found a lot of pockets of writing really, really beautiful but at times found it hard to easily reconcile the two stories together cohesively. I also wish I knew more about post-modern literature. I think that would have helped me make better sense of the smaller details I feel certain I missed.

[Alicia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Daisy & Woolf is a bombshell of a book. Raw, honest, and brutally brilliant, I haven’t stopped thinking about it for days.

The novel splits between Mina’s narrative as she restores life into Daisy Simmons, a forgotten character from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, and Daisy’s own lived experienced as she travels from Kolkata to London to marry English Peter Walsh. Daisy has been left out of Woolf’s own musing on her art, as well as copious amounts of conversation and scholarship that followed Woolf’s legacy.

The story is a post-colonial excavation of Mrs Dalloway, asking the question of who gets to tell whose story? What happens to those characters whose stories don’t get told, who are blotted out from conversation and canon? What happens to characters in the margin, who don’t get the fleshed-out story they deserve? “Can I be assured that this is the right story?”, Mina asks of us and herself. Cahill answers with a resolute yes – it is the right story, and she will prove it to us, to Mina and, perhaps most importantly, to Virginia Woolf.

Cahill’s writing, like Mina’s, like Woolf’s, like Daisy’s, is an act of “scouring time”. Story-telling is a form of time and space travel, and the reader journeys from the early 20th century of Daisy’s Calcutta, Woolf’s London, to Mina’s 21st century world.

The novel is written in stream of consciousness prose that bounces between introspective metafiction, literary criticism, and a startling raw exploration of grief. The story asks us to question Daisy’s absence following her appearance in Mrs Dalloway – what happened to her, the “dark and adorable” married Anglo-Indian woman who Peter Walsh sought to marry? Where did she go once she disappeared from Woolf’s pages, was stricken from Woolf’s pages and criticism and conversation by the writer herself? If “writing is reviving, purging the past” like Cahill claims, then Daisy has been immortalised in Daisy & Woolf. The crime against Daisy and other marginalised characters like her, who have been physically pushed into the margins by Western literary canon, can never be washed away, but writers like Cahill are doing important work in the conversations about canon and representation and history. The very title, Daisy and Woolf, Daisy as the primary subject of our attention, finally the focus of the words, strips away the margin, and caresses Daisy into the centre.

One of the things I adored about the novel was its reflective commentary on the act of writing; Cahill terms that “to write is to die”, “to dream, and to birth (the verb, not the noun)”. To write is expel the rivets of grief that exists in a writer, perhaps as a result of being a writer, to constantly mourn old friends consigned to pages, to sadistically kill new ones at the end of every book. To write is to dream, to create, to birth. Metafiction is difficult genre to nail; literary criticism tackles so much of what it means to write and why writing is important, but Cahill’s take was refreshing – writing and story-telling is the centre of what it means to be human; the be-all and end-all of the human condition.

Daisy & Woolf doesn’t just tackle the absence of Daisy in Woolf scholarship, or the marginalisation of characters of colour in literary canon and society, it also comments on sexuality, immigration politics, gendered violence, climate change, among other topical issues.

Like Daisy’s spectre haunts Mina, and the muse haunts the writer, this novel will haunt me for a long time. I hope Daisy finds a home in the minds of 21st century readers; I hope we can give it to her.

Thank you to Hachette for sending me a free copy in exchange for an honest review, and huge, heartfelt thank you to Michelle Cahill for the gift of this book.

[Riss · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Mrs Dalloway is really a novel about moments accruing, which makes it rather marvellous." Isn't that just a lovely stand-alone line?

Cahill depicts the unravelling of a writer, and perhaps of all writers, as Mina becomes undone in trying to capture the untold story of Daisy, from Woolf's Mrs Dalloway:

"Daisy has made me untrustworthy and erratic...It may suprise a reader to learn that this is how a character can take hold of a writer, even to the extent of thriving at the writer's expense." This is quite creepy, and unfortunately, relatable!

More on this writer-unravelling:
"Writing is like entering the narrowest portals of a rich intuitive world; one cannot leave unmarked." Something worth getting tattooed, or on a post-it above ones' desk at the very least.

I was expecting there to be more of a double story: That of Mina, and that of Daisy. Gradually though, and ironically given the aim of Mina, Daisy seems to disappear. We hear more from Mina lamenting Daisy's absence in Woolf's book, than we do of Mina's creation of Daisy. The latter would surely be more powerful? What does Daisy have to say, now that we're listening and she has the page space to exist within. After the boat journey, I couldn't feel her. She only reappeared for me - I only cared about her and felt her presence again - at the end, when she found a new yet old way to make money.

I normally don't enjoy books with this much descriptive prose. But if anyone can get away with this, it's Cahill. eg:

"And all this would happen within the space of a day and a night, while birds sang and scattered, and branches swayed, and purple crocuses bloomed through tissues of frost, after dark and cold, rain and snow the buds of spring leaves exploded like my mother's words in my mind, and her no longer being able to hear my reply."

"Running his fingers over the brown creases in my pale palms he said the lines of my destiny were like stumps..."

"...the sweet rinse of words with grief on my palate..."

"We in the West are accustomed to brushing off our complicity and our guilt at the crimes of poverty, injustice, exploitation."

I enjoyed being educated through fiction, as Cahill weaves historical events and practices into the story, while building more of who Mina is and what she cares about:

"My cherished Penguin copy has finally fallen apart, the cover ragged, the pages loose, the way a woman comes apart if she is overused and abused because she is considered surplus and therefore less, if the patriarchal world exhausts her labour and her body, her slots, even her skin. (Hard to believe this fetish practice...how the skin of outcast women from alms houses was used in the binding of scholarly books!) That a poor woman's skin should serve the scholarship of the elite! The hierarchies. A kind of horror!"

This scene was so well done: "Gr8 night, LOL. Emoji. Laughing face."

I had to work reading this, but I was rewarded for doing so. Thank you Michelle Cahill.

[Sharon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Daisy and Woolf.

I was gripped from the start by this layered captivating novel with its complex characters. I had read over a hundred pages before I realised it. Like Woolf’s narratives, Cahill’s writing has a pleasing rhythm, the narrative sweeps up the reader and transports them to other times and places.

The premise is brilliant, the structure of intertwined narratives works to reveal the stories behind Mina who is travelling while researching and writing a novel in which she imagines the tale of Woolf’s character Daisy Simmons, to satisfy her curiosity.

I never really took to the character of Peter Walsh in Mrs Dalloway, though I was fascinated by him and his strange ways. He is an intriguing character and his relationship with the elusive Daisy added to his quirkiness. In my mind, I equated him with the British actor Kenneth Connor.

In the contemporary strand of Cahill’s narrative, author Mina – daughter grieving her mother/single mother of a teenaged son -- is thinking about and telling us about her research, of the agony of trying to capture elusive and reluctant characters, giving a glimpse into the mind of an author during the process of researching the characters of Woolf’s novel while writing a literary novel of her own. The reader is privy to the author Mina’s inner thoughts through stream of consciousness. As her ideas percolate, Daisy Simmons emerges and becomes more substantial. We learn about her life, her struggles, her opinions, her feelings and her fondest hopes and dreams. We see how these are transformed by tragedy, reality, and that singular English obsession with a brutally delineating class system – who belongs and who doesn’t.

Cahill’s novel works on several levels. The contemporary voice of Mina and the letters written by Daisy draw readers into disparate and diverse narratives about relationships that may or may not exist in the interstices of time and space.

It is also a rigorously researched literary work, enhanced by Cahill’s intuitive development of the characters and the depth of her knowledge and understanding of Woolf’s writing and in particular Mrs. Dalloway.

Some reviewers have commented about the ending. I won’t give any spoilers but while not at all predictable, Daisy’s situation is inevitable despite the reader wishing her a more favourable outcome. She is a woman of her time, class, and position. Nonetheless in her own way, Daisy has made peace with herself. With limited choices, she has chosen to be her own mistress.

If you happen to be a fan of Woolf’s writing as I am, and enjoyed Mrs Dalloway, then this novel will give added pleasure. I am full of admiration for this book.

[Sharon Rundle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Daisy and Woolf.

I was gripped from the start by this layered captivating novel with its complex characters. I had read over a hundred pages before I realised it. Like Woolf’s narratives, Cahill’s writing has a pleasing rhythm, the narrative sweeps up the reader and transports them to other times and places.

The premise is brilliant, the structure of intertwined narratives works to reveal the stories behind Mina who is travelling while researching and writing a novel in which she imagines the tale of Woolf’s character Daisy Simmons, to satisfy her curiosity.

I never really took to the character of Peter Walsh in Mrs Dalloway, though I was fascinated by him and his strange ways. He is an intriguing character and his relationship with the elusive Daisy added to his quirkiness. In my mind, I equated him with the British actor Kenneth Connor.

In the contemporary strand of Cahill’s narrative, author Mina – daughter grieving her mother/single mother of a teenaged son -- is thinking about and telling us about her research, of the agony of trying to capture elusive and reluctant characters, giving a glimpse into the mind of an author during the process of researching the characters of Woolf’s novel while writing a literary novel of her own. The reader is privy to the author Mina’s inner thoughts through stream of consciousness. As her ideas percolate, Daisy Simmons emerges and becomes more substantial. We learn about her life, her struggles, her opinions, her feelings and her fondest hopes and dreams. We see how these are transformed by tragedy, reality, and that singular English obsession with a brutally delineating class system – who belongs and who doesn’t.

Cahill’s novel works on several levels. The contemporary voice of Mina and the letters written by Daisy draw readers into disparate and diverse narratives about relationships that may or may not exist in the interstices of time and space.

It is also a rigorously researched literary work, enhanced by Cahill’s intuitive development of the characters and the depth of her knowledge and understanding of Woolf’s writing and in particular Mrs. Dalloway.

Some reviewers have commented about the ending. I won’t give any spoilers but while not at all predictable, Daisy’s situation is inevitable despite the reader wishing her a more favourable outcome. She is a woman of her time, class, and position. Nonetheless in her own way, Daisy has made peace with herself. With limited choices, she has chosen to be her own mistress.

If you happen to be a fan of Woolf’s writing as I am, and enjoyed Mrs Dalloway, then this novel wil

[Craig and Phil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you Hachette for sending us a copy to read and review.
Navigating the journey of life, consolidating a writing career and a passion to reimagine a character and her destiny from a literary great are ensconced beautifully in this well written story.
Mina is a writer.
Connected to Australia and the UK she flits between the countries and travels the world.
Her dedication to the works and personal life of Virginia Woolf becoming almost obsessive as she explores what may have happened to a minor character from her book Mrs Dalloway.
Daisy was a brief love interest of the dashing man in the book.
A girl from India who falls in love with the Englishman but loses out to an English aristocrat lady.
Mina in her reinvention has a different destiny for Daisy.
A very interesting and at times a little confusing this journey of confronting death, sexuality and the overwhelming pressure to produce a book.
By allowing Daisy to break free she releases herself.
I really enjoy this style of writing, a mashup of history and fictional license to create and control new stories.
Clever interpretation aligned with the classic that is Virginia Woolf.

[Deborah Wall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Daisy & Woolf is a work of fiction. It’s truism is seen in Cahill’s well researched novel including Woolf’s connection to the subcontinent and her outlook on colonial India. A literary device Cahill employs is the use of personal letters of her characters that thread colonial stance that traverses time and space where past and present coalesce. Cahill focuses on the lack of development of Woolf’s characterisation of Daisy. In Mrs Dalloway, Cahill sees through Woolf’s ethnocentrism and disguised racism. In her imagining, Cahill wants to give Daisy, a woman of colour, a voice.

The historical and cultural background she provides for her repertoire of character casting is rich. Woolf’s is restricted by her lack of empathy for the predicament of the likes of Daisy. But of course, we are all offspring of our stations in life. Woolf is writing/speaking from a position of privilege. The point is: the fullness of the lives of women of colour in Western cultures is likely arrested by their marginalisation in social settings; their insignificance and lack of voice, still presumed and assumed.

[Anna Croser · Rating 2 out of 5]

There were some really lovely parts in here! I just feel like the chapters written in the present day were a tad over written? Lots of references to selfies and iphones that for some reason rubbed me the wrong way. There were also moments of some beautiful reflection that went into rants or poetic imagery that just didn’t quite work for me but maybe that’s just because I’m not being used to Cahill’s writing style.

The back and forth between past and present worked really well to highlight the effects of colonialism in our world however I did get a little lost between all the different voices and characters that were speaking. In the format of letters it’s hard to know who’s talking until they sign off at the end.

I’m finishing this novel feeling like I’ve read a good chunk of thought provoking literature but I’m not feeling much connection to the characters.

[Peter Gilkes · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is all about travel. Travel across physical space, travel through time, living through moments and living through years, traveling parallel to other lives and the deep space of travel through memories. My favourite line in the whole book is when the author says, "On my lips I wanted Daisy". There is so much movement between worlds I get giddy, but when Michelle gets it right and her words shape an image with such craft its almost like origami, a delicate showing of something fragile and gossamer and real. Then she rushes away, to another time and place. This is not an easy read, but when you settle into the rhythm it unfolds perspectives and nuances and splashes of images that will satiate your journey through all these waves of time.

[Sian Santiago · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book had some powerful moments of reflection and some great commentary on the contemporary world, as well as a woman’s place within it.
After reading the text, I believe that Mrs Dalloway is very important pre reading, more important than I initially assumed. I bought this book for a book club without having read Mrs Dalloway beforehand. I would strongly suggest that others take the time to read both texts so that the narrative flow and characterisation is easier to follow throughout Daisy & Woolf.

[Blair · Rating 3 out of 5]

You're potentially setting yourself up for problems when you riff on a classic like Mrs Dalloway in that by bringing it to mind your reader may well be thinking: it's just not as good as Woolf. You've got a further potential problem when you bring to mind a book like Wide Sargasso Sea in that this is also a revisionary look at a minor character from a classic (Daisy Simmons in Mrs Dalloway) so that your reader may also be thinking: it's just not as good as Rhys. I'm teaching Mrs Dalloway right now so was very keen to check this out but was largely disappointed.

[Anne Fenn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This seems to be a polarising book. I enjoyed it, kept my interest as the one book of five I started last week. The other four, I didn’t finish.
It’s certainly a mix, has two narratives going. One involves a fictitious novel of letters and narration about a character Daisy, originally in the Virginia Woolf novel Mrs Dalloway. The other thread follows the ‘writer’ as she struggles with life and her ability to write this Daisy novel. The Daisy novel was far more interesting. The writer novel has so much in it, you wonder why Michelle Cahill included it all. However the writer novel’s stand out feature was the stunning beauty of Cahill’s expression.

[Hariklia Heristanidis · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘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.

Read my full review: https://www.kalliopex.com/review-dais...

[Sue · Rating 1 out of 5]

Tis one had me perplexed, It should come with a warning to read or re-read Woolf's Mrs Dalloway beforehand, given the writer's assumption that her readers will be as intimate with that book as she is. I found my attention wandering throughout and it was difficult to maintain any interest in either Mina or Daisy as they meandered and maundered through time.

[Susi Hendricks · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were some beautifully written parts which I wanted to sear into memory. At times it was hard to keep up with the flow of it and it felt disjointed. It may have helped to have read the novel - Mrs Dalloway first.

[Grit Tarrant · Rating 2 out of 5]

The struggle of writing a book. If not familiar with Virginia Woolf's work, that book becomes another painful experience to suffer through a novel.

[Emma Gables · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful, interesting, intelligent and creative novel. I would give it more stars if I could. I adored it.

[Kimberley Burgess · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hard to get through as I haven’t read Mrs Dalloway by Virigina Wolfe. Enjoyed Daisy’s diary entries regarding her voyage rather than Minas chapters. Was hoping for a better ending for poor Daisy.

[Tina Willaws · Rating 5 out of 5]

A remarkable book; I was completely absorbed in Daisy's story, her voice and her travels from the beginning. The voyages of the brown women, beautifully expressing, and trespassing on Woolf's privileged space.