The Hours

The Hours is the third novel by the American writer Michael Cunningham, published in 1998; it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999 and was later adapted into a film of the same name. With Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway as its hidden thread, the book interweaves three parallel narratives across three times and places, each depicting one day in the life of a woman. In the 1920s, Woolf rests in Richmond on the outskirts of London, enduring the recurrences of her mental illness while conceiving and beginning to write Mrs Dalloway; in postwar California, the housewife Laura Brown, pregnant, finds daily life suffocating as she reads and repeatedly thinks of leaving; in New York at the end of the twentieth century, the book editor Clarissa is called "Mrs Dalloway" by those around her and is preparing a party to celebrate her longtime friend, the poet Richard, who has been ill for years—yet on that day something happens that she cannot undo. The three women do not know one another, yet they are linked by a book, a situation, and the same kind of questioning. The novel winds gradually toward its close through a party, a suicide, and a stretch of writing, weaving the experiences of women in three eras into a symphony of loss and hope, fear and love, and those "hours" of a brief life. Cunningham pays homage to his predecessor in precise, restrained prose while bringing Woolfian stream of consciousness into his own contemporary American context.