In Daisy Woolf, Michelle Cahill revisits a modernist classic to write a story of her own
- Written by Jessica Gildersleeve, Associate Professor of English Literature, University of Southern Queensland
Michelle Cahill’s Daisy & Woolf takes its epigraph and its inspiration from Virginia Woolf’s feminist essay A Room of One’s Own (1929): “A woman writing thinks back through her mothers.”
But who are those mothers? Who are those women who dared to write – and whose voices we have not heard?
Review: Daisy & Woolf – Michelle Cahill (Hachette)
Daisy & Woolf is Cahill’s first novel, although she has previously published collections of poetry and short stories, including Letter to Pessoa, which won a New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award in 2017. The novel is boldly touted as a successor to Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) in its revising of a literary classic.
Read more: Guide to the classics: A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf's feminist call to arms