The Hours is a 1998 novel by the American author Michael Cunningham. It is an homage to Virginia Woolf’s 1923 novel Mrs. Dalloway (of which the working title was “The Hours”). Mimicking Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness narrative style, Cunningham re-situates her characters and themes within a modern context, making them his own. The story follows three different women, in three different decades, affected by Mrs. Dalloway over the course of one June day in each of their lives: a fictional Virginia Woolf in the suburbs of London as she starts her novel in 1923; a housewife Laura Brown in 1949 Los Angeles who escapes her unhappy life by reading Mrs. Dalloway; and Clarissa Vaughan, a 52-year-old publisher in 1990s New York City who yearns for a relationship like Woolf and her husband had. As the historical Woolf did, Cunningham explores themes of marginalized sexual orientations, mental illness, suicide, and existential crisis. In 1999, The Hours won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 2002, it was adapted into an eponymous Oscar-winning film starring Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep, and Julianne Moore. This guide refers to the Macmillan ebook edition and contains discussion of suicide.

Plot Summary

The novel’s narrative is nonlinear, and it jumps between three women who are each in a different decade: Virginia Woolf, Clarissa Vaughan, Laura Brown.

The book opens in 1941 England as Virginia Woolf hurries toward the river near her house, leaving a suicide note for her husband, Leonard. She notices the beauty of the world around her and the drone of bomber planes overhead, but she is determined to kill herself. She puts a large stone in her pocket and walks into the river. Her body floats along until it comes to rest against a bridge piling, through which the echoes of life above resonate through her body.

In 1990s New York City, Clarissa Vaughan (nicknamed Mrs. Dalloway by her friend Richard) is headed to buy flowers for the party she’s throwing that night in honor of Richard winning the Carruthers Prize in poetry. Clarissa loves life and the small pleasures it offers. As she walks to the florist’s, Clarissa grapples with aging, her fading social significance, and Richard, who has AIDS. Passing by a corner on which she and Richard fought over their romance when they were teenagers, Clarissa wonders what a life with Richard would have been like.

The narrative jumps back in time to the suburbs of London in 1923—nearly two decades before Virginia’s suicide. Virginia awakes with an idea for her nascent novel Mrs. Dalloway. Her husband, Leonard, worries about her health: They’ve retreated to the suburbs from London to cure Virginia’s migraines and auditory hallucinations (the historical Woolf never received an accurate diagnosis in her lifetime, but many scholars now suspect she had a mood disorder in addition to migraines). Virginia relishes the feeling of sitting down to write with a new idea. Nothing else compares.

The narrative shifts again, and the reader is introduced to the third woman—Laura Brown—in 1949 Los Angeles on her husband, Dan’s, birthday. She’s reading Mrs. Dalloway in bed, procrastinating the day of birthday preparations ahead of her. Laura, now pregnant with her second child, wonders how someone as brilliant as Woolf could die by suicide. She forces herself to walk to the kitchen to greet Dan and her three-year-old son, Richie. Laura is plagued by the feeling she’s stuck in someone else’s life

Clarissa visits Richard, who lives in a squalid apartment building. She reminds him about the party, which Richard says he doesn’t want to attend. Clarissa assures him he only needs to show up and be himself. The two reminisce about a kiss they shared years ago, and Clarissa tells Richard that she’ll come by later to help him get ready for the evening’s festivities.

Virginia has finished writing for the day, knowing that doing more would trigger a migraine. She has decided that her protagonist, Mrs. Dalloway, will kill herself. Virginia yearns to return to the city life of London, even though doing so would affect her health. She would rather die there writing amidst the raucousness of the city than fade out in the quiet suburb of Richmond.

Laura is disappointed in the birthday cake she and Richie have baked—it’s not the image of bounty she imagined. Laura’s neighbor, Kitty, visits, telling Laura she has to have surgery for a mass on her uterus. Laura comforts Kitty, and the two briefly kiss, flooding Laura with desire. After Kitty leaves, Laura throws the cake away and starts a new one.

Clarissa returns home and greets her partner, Sally, who is going out. Clarissa is still preoccupied by memories from her and Richard’s summer romance in 1965. Alone in her and Sally’s apartment, Clarissa feels trapped by the possessions that surround her, and by Sally. She fantasizes about absconding and regaining her freedom.

Virginia worries her novel won’t persuasively convey the suffering of a domestic woman’s life. Her sister Vanessa and her children visit. The children want to bury a dead bird, prompting Virginia to ponder mortality and whether her fiction is as important as family. She feels overwhelmed by the profusion of life her sister and her children symbolize. She imagines herself as a character in her book who is fated to turn away from this profusion of life and die by suicide.

Laura’s second cake also feels inadequate. Her mind swirling with emotions from her kiss with Kitty, she leaves Richie with a neighbor and drives to a hotel. There, she reads Mrs. Dalloway, feeling that she has momentarily escaped her life’s constraints. She considers how easy it would be to give up on life and choose suicide, but she vows not to because it would destroy Dan, Richie, and her unborn child.

Clarissa’s teenage daughter, Julia, returns home with her friend Mary Krull, a queer theorist in her forties. Clarissa and Mary hate each other: Mary detests Clarissa’s conventionally feminine self-presentation, seeing it as a betrayal of the queer ethos, and Clarissa feels threatened by Mary’s politics. Clarissa worries she isn’t a good mother.

Laura picks up her son and returns home. After serving Dan his birthday dinner, she watches him show Richie how to cut the cake, feeling this may be the one perfect moment in her life. Nevertheless, as she prepares for bed, she dissociates, realizing that her life doesn’t allow her to be her true self. She picks up a full bottle of sleeping pills, fantasizing how death would free her while showing everyone how much she suffered. (The reader soon learns that Laura attempts suicide and survives.)

Virginia feels suffocated by her house and sneaks away into the cool night. She sees the bed of roses the children made for the bird, which now just looks like trash. She decides to take a train to London before dinner, but as she waits a worried Leonard comes looking for her and they go back to the house. At dinner, Virginia convinces Leonard to move back to London, where she can pursue the literary life she’s meant for. She’s decided she’d rather experience a complete relapse in London than live a muted, healthy life in Richmond.

At Richard’s apartment, Clarissa hears no response to her knock. When she enters, she’s surprised by the amount of light in the typically dim apartment. She finds Richard straddling a windowsill, admiring the fading day. He tells Clarissa the hours are too much for him—living through one after another while he feels so ill. Clarissa begs him to come inside; Richard jumps to his death.

Back at her apartment, Clarissa is relieved to see that Julia has cleared the party preparations. Clarissa has brought Laura Brown, who is revealed to be Richard’s mother. After surviving her suicide attempt, she fled to Canada and became a librarian. She and Clarissa acknowledge they both did the best they could for Richard. Clarissa acknowledges that she cannot regain past happiness and that while life is mostly a collection of ordinary hours, occasionally there come some hours that transcend the ordinary, realizing your greatest desires. With no one to call her Mrs. Dalloway any longer, Clarissa Vaughan is free to finally be herself.