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The Hours
by Michael Cunningham |
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| Publishing Data |
 Published in 1998 |
| Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award |
| Made into a feature film starring Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep, and Julianne Moore; Kidman won an Oscar for her portrayal of Virginia Woolf. |
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The Hours juxtaposes the seemingly unrelated stories of three women:
- Clarissa Vaughan (referred to throughout as Mrs. Dalloway) in New York City at the end of the 20th century who is preparing to give a party in honor of her friend and onetime love Richard, a poet who is dying of AIDS.
- Virginia Woolf (referred to throughout as Mrs. Woolf) in a suburb of London in 1923 where she begins to write her novel Mrs. Dalloway
- Laura Brown (referred to throughout as Mrs. Brown), a pregnant wife and mother in Los Angeles in 1949 who with her 3-year-old son Richie is preparing a birthday cake for her husband while she longs to be reading the novel Mrs. Dalloway.
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| Background |
The Hours takes inspiration from, echoes, and elaborates on Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925).
In Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway on a Wednesday in June of 1923 prepares for and hosts a party while elsewhere in London the war veteran Septimus Smith grows increasingly desperate to end his own life. |
| The Hours was Woolf's original title for Mrs. Dalloway. |
Cunningham consulted biographies of Woolf as well as diaries to portray as accurately as possible the historical Virginia Woolf as she might have behaved on the day she began writing Mrs.
Dalloway. |
Here are some of the obvious parallels between The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway:
- The events of Mrs. Dalloway and the events of each of the three stories in The Hours all take place in one day.
- Like Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Vaughan and Laura Brown are each preparing for a party. Clarissa Vaughan's actions during the day very closely mirror the actions of Clarissa Dalloway in the Woolf novel.
- Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway and the poet Richard in The Hours suffer the same fate
- Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway and Virginia Woolf and Laura Brown in The Hours all suffer from mental illness.
In addition there are also many individual scenes and descriptions of settings that echo similar scenes and descriptions in Mrs. Dalloway.
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| Discussion Guide |
| The novel begins with an account of Virginia Woolf's suicide in 1941. How does your knowledge of Woolf's eventual fate color your perception of the portrayal of Woolf in the body of the novel? |
| Characterize Mrs. Woolf. What is her relationship with her husband? What is she trying to accomplish with the writing of the novel that became Mrs. Dalloway? |
| Characterize Mrs. Dalloway (Clarissa Vaughan). Describe her relationship with her partner Sally. Describe her relationship with Richard. Describe her relationship with her daughter Julia. What is Mrs. Dalloway's motive for hosting this party? |
| Characterize Mrs. Brown. Describe her relationship with her husband. Describe her relationship with her son Richie. How does she feel about her marriage and her pregnancy? Why is she so involved in reading the novel Mrs. Dalloway? |
| Characterize Richard. Describe his relationship with Mrs. Dalloway (Clarissa). How does he feel about the party and the award he is about to receive? |
| Characterize Richard's work. How does he portray Clarissa in his novel? Is the portrayal fair? How does he portray his mother in his poetry? Is the portrayal fair? |
| Compare Mrs. Dalloway's preparations for her party to Mrs. Brown's preparations for her husband's birthday to Mrs. Woolf's preparations for the visit from her sister. |
| Why does Mrs. Woolf want to go to London? |
| Why does Mrs. Brown take a hotel room for the afternoon? |
| Mrs. Woolf, Mrs. Brown, and Richard are all suicidal. Compare and contrast the causes of their despair. Compare and contrast their actions on the days described in the novel. |
| What is your reaction when you discover at the end of the novel how the characters are interconnected? |
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Novels
© 2005 Dr. Agatha Taormina
Last Revised:
November 5, 2009
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