the hours by michael cunningham (1998)

“There’s just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.”


This is a clever book interspersing one day the lives of three women at three different time periods – Virginia Woolf at the time she is writing Mrs. Dalloway (1923); Laura Brown, pregnant with her second child and mesmerized with her reading of Mrs. Dalloway (1949); and Clarissa Vaughan, aged 52 years old whom her close friend Richard has taken to calling “Mrs. Dalloway” (1998).

These are women going about their own ways yet, the thread of the story of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Woolf’s own tragic death looms over all the characters, culminating one evening in Vaughan’s home after she has witnessed somebody jumping from a window ledge earlier that day.

This 1990 Pulitzer prize gripping story was made into a film in 2002 starring Meryl Streep (Clarissa Vaughan), Julianne Moore (Laura Brown), and Nicole Kidman (Virigina Woolf). Kidman won an Oscar for best actress in this film.