The narrative jumps back in time to the suburbs of London in 1923-nearly two decades before Virginia’s suicide. 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. As she walks to the florist’s, Clarissa grapples with aging, her fading social significance, and Richard, who has AIDS. Clarissa loves life and the small pleasures it offers. 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.

In 1990s New York City, Clarissa Vaughan (nicknamed Mrs. Her body floats along until it comes to rest against a bridge piling, through which the echoes of life above resonate through her body. She puts a large stone in her pocket and walks into the river. She notices the beauty of the world around her and the drone of bomber planes overhead, but she is determined to kill herself. The book opens in 1941 England as Virginia Woolf hurries toward the river near her house, leaving a suicide note for her husband, Leonard. 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. This guide refers to the Macmillan ebook edition and contains discussion of suicide. In 2002, it was adapted into an eponymous Oscar-winning film starring Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep, and Julianne Moore. In 1999, The Hours won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. As the historical Woolf did, Cunningham explores themes of marginalized sexual orientations, mental illness, suicide, and existential crisis. 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. 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. The story follows three different women, in three different decades, affected by Mrs.

Mimicking Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness narrative style, Cunningham re-situates her characters and themes within a modern context, making them his own. Dalloway (of which the working title was “The Hours”). It is an homage to Virginia Woolf’s 1923 novel Mrs. The Hours is a 1998 novel by the American author Michael Cunningham.

As Horas by Michael Cunningham