Book Club - Michelle Cahill’s Daisy & Woolf

Final Draft - Great Conversations

Michelle Cahill is a poet, author and essayist. Her short story collection Letter to Pessoa (Giramondo) won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for New Writing and Michelle has a slew of awards and nominations. Michelle’s latest novel is Daisy and Woolf.

Daisy & Woolf works itself into the spaces between the seminal Virginia Woolf novel Mrs Dalloway.

Woolf’s novel expands across a single day in London society. Clarissa Dalloway embarks to order the flowers. She will host a party that night and she must be prepared. Across the city characters intersect and nearly miss each other in a web of events and reminiscences.

One character, remarked upon but who never speaks in Daisy Simmons. It is Daisy who Michelle Cahill rescues from her literary silence to explore her lot and inner world. In doing so Cahill is opening up her novel to the silenced voices of Anglo Indian character who very much occupied Woolf’s mind but failed to feature in her novel.

1924 - Daisy Simmons works to arrange passage from Calcutta to London. She must leave her family, desperate to be reunited with her lover Peter Walsh. It is a journey that demands much from her and will extract a price. What can she expect on the other side of the world and is it worth her exercising this reckless freedom?

2017 - Mina is a writer trying to pull together the threads of Virginia Woolf’s work into a unique novel. Mina wants to restore agency and voice to Daisy, giving her the story Woolf glossed over.

As Mina works to free Daisy from her fictional invisibility she must also reconcile herself to the bonds of her own world; career, family and duty all pulling on her. These are the so-called responsibilities a woman must meet and in shucking them off to write in London Mina must learn to make peace with the costs a writer must pay in bringing a life onto the page…

I found Daisy & Woolf a delightfully literary novel. In writing into the cannon of modernist literature Cahill is challenging us to understand what the cannon means to us (and by way of clarification - by cannon I mean the books that are prescribed on syllabus, you know the ones you’re told you simply have to read)

With great affection for Woolf, Cahill also challenges the narrowness of the voices she presents to us. Daisy’s world is rich and varied but also beset by its own power dynamics.

It seems that in any story some voices will invariably be privileged over others. Just as Woolf failed to give us a whisper of Daisy, in turn Cahill must struggle with the story of Rhadhika. This is not a fault of the book, rather it challenges us as the reader to understand the limitations of storytelling (and I think in turn challenges us to read widely and of many authors with unique perspectives).

The stories of Daisy & Woolf intersect to show us the ways that women are hemmed into ways of living and prescribed modes of being. Both Daisy and Mina struggle with their role as mother and the expectations that their own lives should be secondary to their child.

Both Daisy and Mina adventure, but with consequence as the novel travels the reader across the globe.

Daisy & Woolf is a lush and beautifully realized exploration of life as told through literature. It’s both an homage and a challenge to the literary lives many of us love to get lost in and it left me with a fresh perspective on how I read a novel.

Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

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