This risky novel of three parallel stories linked thematically by the Woolf’s “Mrs. As with the other novels that have remained dear to me, it’s the writing-the mesmerizing voice, the impeccable language, the virtuoso style-that delivers. Not only does The Hours still belong in my top 25, it likely belongs in the top ten. “The Hours” made my list of the The Most Important Novels in My Life, from which I’ve been re-reading during the time of COVID-19.
Years later, along came Michael Cunningham’s “The Hours,” which I first read when it came out in 1997 (later saw the quality film adaptation). I found her style to be dense and inscrutable. Dalloway,” and “A Room of One’s Own”-I never fully embraced her. Forgive me.īut even after I did read Woolf-I vaguely remember “To the Lighthouse,” “Mrs. As the novel jump-cuts through the century, the lives and stories of the three women converge, stunningly and unexpectedly, the night of Clarissa's party for Richard. Dalloway, chats with her husband and sister, bickers with her cook, and attempts to come to terms with her deep, ungovernable longings for escape and even for death. And Virginia Woolf herself, the third woman, works on her new novel, Mrs. Laura Brown, a young wife and mother in 1949 Los Angeles, cares for her toddler and prepares a birthday cake for her husband as she tries to resist increasing waves of panic and feelings of alienation from her humdrum yet demanding life. The novel moves along three separate but parallel stories, each focusing on the experiences of a particular woman during the course of one apparently unremarkable but in fact pivotal day.Ĭlarissa Vaughan, a book editor in present-day Greenwich Village, is organizing a party for her oldest friend, Richard, an AIDS-stricken poet who has just won a major literary prize. In this remarkable book, Cunningham draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the story of a group of characters struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, life and death, creation and destruction.
By the end of the novel, the stories have intertwined, and finally come together in an act of subtle and haunting grace, demonstrating Michael Cunningham’s deep empathy for his characters as well as the extraordinary resonance of his language. Passionate, profound, and deeply moving, The Hours tells the story of three women: Clarissa Vaughan, who one New York morning goes about planning a party in honor of a beloved friend Laura Brown, who in a 1950s Los Angeles suburb slowly begins to feel the constraints of a perfect family and home and Virginia Woolf, recuperating with her husband in a London suburb and beginning to write Mrs. Winner, 1999 Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award
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