A feminist triumph and homage to Virginia Woolf, Miranda Darling’s Thunderhead is a potent exploration of suburban entrapment for women. The novella opens with a complex satire of Ian McEwan’s response to Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) in his novel Saturday (2005). All three books are set over the course of a single day, where the intricacies of both the quotidian and extraordinary occur. In this novella’s opening paragraphs, Darling’s protagonist, Winona Dalloway, wakes to see the sky ablaze through her window. While ‘it is dawn in the suburbs of the east’ – rather than a burning plane, evoking 9/11 terrorism, as in McEwan’s novel – she believes it ‘telegraphs a warning, red sky in the morning’. This refers to the opening of Mrs Dalloway, where Clarissa Dalloway feels, ‘standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen’.

Woolf’s use of modernist stream of consciousness is also important to Thunderhead. In adapting this technique, Darling wrests the narrative away from the male characters. In Mrs Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway is presented as lonely, disillusioned, and depressed, and, as in that novel, Darling reveals that there is something more than clinical depression driving Winona’s feelings of domestic confinement. She creates dynamic and complex postmodern interior monologues for her protagonist, foregrounding her rich and often surprising inner life. Some of this is achieved through the use of lists and list making, which is one of the most inventive, darkly comic, and sardonic features of the novella.

Furthermore, Winona’s need for, and reliance on, lists serves to emphasise her listlessness. The first list is: ‘LIST OF QUALITIES FOR FAILED DOMESTICATION’, which focuses on six qualities that make a species untameable. It is an illuminating moment as the protagonist reveals she has the qualities on the list and thinks, ‘Perhaps, you, Winona, are single-handedly spearheading the re-wilding of suburbia’, imagining herself as a ‘zebra walking down New South Head Road during rush hour, parting traffic, hardy and independent’. This is an evocative and important metaphor in the novella.

This desire for the untamed, fierce, undomesticated, and uncultivated is a heady moment of eco-feminist thought and political activism for Winona, who is infantilised and treated as incompetent by her nameless husband. He sends her lists in the form of text-message demands and fills her calendar with entries that he frames as reminders. In addition to the grocery lists that reference the dinner parties in which Woolf’s, McEwan’s and Darling’s books culminate, the use of lists in Thunderhead is a coping mechanism for Winona and includes: ‘BOUNDARIES THAT SHOULD NOT BE CROSSED’; ‘WORDS FOR WINONA’; ‘COLOURATIONS’; ‘ON THE HEALING PROPERTIES OF GARDENS’; ‘ON WHY TETHERING IS NECESSARY’; ‘THINGS I SHOULD BE FRIGHTENED OF TODAY.’ The lists are luminous and often witty moments that contain important revelations. For instance, ‘CAUSES OF SILENCE’ ends with the rumination: ‘the Spiral of Silence. My thoughts snag here. The Spiral of Silence. Public Opinion–Our Social Skin.’

In a clever play on words, perhaps the most telling list comes from the moment where Winona reads an envelope addressed to her as ‘Mrs Dalloway’. Referencing Woolf’s infamous suicide in the line, ‘roll[ing] the name around like a pebble in my pocket’, she sees her name as a list emphasising the trajectory of dilly-dallying as a concept moving toward absence: ‘Dalloway. Dally Away. Dale Away. Away. (gone).’ These are nods to Clarissa Dalloway who feels ‘invisible, unseen; unknown’. Importantly, while Clarissa states that ‘she would buy the flowers herself’, Winona prioritises ‘gentle recklessness’ to state, ‘I have to focus: I have a bomb to defuse at home. And guests invited to dinner. I will do the flowers myself.’

The novella contains many intertextual moments to complement Winona’s life as a writer, which adds a metafictional element to this book. Winona writes ‘to close the gap in [her] life’ and to ‘find a way to connect [her] deeper self to this ephemera of living’. In Winona’s novel, her character Nora (who has qualities reminiscent of Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House) must make a choice to accept or reject a marriage proposal. Nora’s deep romantic inner life is in many ways akin to Emma Bovary, and an example of failed domestication, which Winona labels ‘The Anna Karenina Effect’. Intertextually, the novella pays homage to the ‘wild’ heroines in Victorian literature whose freedom often came at an unbearable cost:

I should have chosen a different dress: the long flannel check suddenly has shades of Virginia Woolf, calls to mind rivers and stones and Victorian women encased in attics for their own good: for the good of the family.

Sluts or Nuts.

Furthermore, Winona is engaged with ‘matters of the heart’, especially when she is told by Dr McAlister she has arrhythmia – [t]he improper beating of the heart, irregular, at times too fast in your case’ – and that ‘Your heart shows signs of cardiomegaly. You have an enlarged heart.’ This is also explored in the momentum of the novella, which often becomes a gallop for the reader. As the clock counts down the hours in the day, we are wonderfully lost in Winona’s ruminating fugue. The fast breaths invoked at the beginning of the novel become part of its narrative impetus.

Named after a round cloud that appears before a thunderstorm, Thunderhead is darkly jubilant. When Winona states, ‘We all want happy endings Win. They are not always possible’, her use of the diminutive ‘Win’, ultimately suggests the possibility of escaping her husband’s controlling behaviour. In one brave moment she becomes the embodiment of Woolf’s ‘match struck in the dark’, when she embraces ‘Winona the kaleidoscope constantly fracturing and re-fracturing into hundreds of dislocating points of coloured light’.