#note: i’ve used the term anglo-indian to describe daisy though the novel uses euroasian primarily for 20th century characters

[dashedwithromance]

DAISY & WOOLF - Michelle Cahill

Rating: 5 stars

Release date: April 27th, 2022

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.