By Michael Cunningham, this was published in 1998, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999.

Four years later, Stephen Daldry made a movie version, starring Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman. If you ask anyone about this movie, what s/he will remember first, I think, is Nicole Kidman's nose... Which is a pity. It was well filmed, and I was intrigued by the central idea of weaving the life of Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) into the lives of two other women who read her later. I did wonder, however, if it wasn't all just a tiny bit contrived.

Well, the book absolutely doesn't leave you with that feeling.

Our three strands, threading in and out of each other very fluently, follow Virginia Woolf herself (living in the London suburb of Richmond in 1923, and struggling to write Mrs Dalloway); a woman named Clarissa Vaughan (a late-20th-century resident of New York City, nicknamed Mrs Dalloway by Richard, who is her one-time lover and long-standing friend, and the person in whose honour she is giving, in true Dalloway fashion, a party); and Laura Brown (living in Los Angeles in 1949, devouring Mrs Dalloway, and struggling, as a wife and mother, to find time for the reading that is her lifeline).

You don't have to be familiar with Mrs Dalloway to enjoy The Hours, but if you are, it helps you appreciate the nuance and intricacy of this novel. It's so cleverly done. There's a detailed comparison here, but the brief version is that Cunningham creatively remasters the original, so that themes, characters, and scenes from Mrs Dalloway are picked up, exhibited in different lights, knit together, dispersed, reunited -- all the while gathering further layers of meaning. It's a short book, but it's profoundly convincing.



The Prologue takes us to 1941, and Woolf's suicide. Her thoughts are particularly heart-breaking given our knowledge of what her work was worth: "She herself has failed. She is not a writer at all, really; she is merely a gifted eccentric... She has failed, and now the voices are back... and the headache is approaching as surely as rain, the headache that will crush whatever is she and replace her with itself." The letter she leaves for her husband, Leonard, is full of love and gratitude.

Back in the 1920s, we see that Woolf's mental health is already fragile. Leonard wants her to stay in Richmond, because it's calmer there. Virginia despises its small-town ways, and longs to be back in the city. She plugs on with her writing, but it's hard to produce much at a time, with headaches constantly looming. Still, 250 words is better than nothing. She's never satisfied, though: "One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper."

We hear of two breakthroughs for the plot of Mrs Dalloway. The first is the decision to let Clarissa, her party-giving protagonist, live, and assign the planned death to someone else... "Clarissa will be bereaved, deeply lonely, but she will not die. She will be too much in love with life, with London... Someone else, a deranged poet, a visionary, will be the one to die." The second arises from the spontaneous kiss Virginia gives her sister, Vanessa: "It feels like the most delicious and forbidden of pleasures." And -- in Cunningham's telling, at least -- it allows Clarissa's character to grow a bit more in Woolf's mind (giving us that unforgotten kiss with Sally Seton).


Interior With a Housemaid, circa 1939, by Vanessa Bell

Our other Clarissa, meanwhile, our New York "Mrs Dalloway", is doing many of the things her namesake does in Woolf's book. She buys flowers, she invites to the party someone she feels she probably oughtn't to have invited, she notices unusual sounds, and speculates about celebrities.

It's a sad kind of party she's preparing for, though. Richard is being feted, but at the same time, he is dying of Aids, and his mental state is severely impacted: He "is disappearing into his illness, his insanity". There was once a complicated triangle involving Clarissa, Richard, and Louis. Richard chooses Louis, but never forgets Clarissa. He writes a book about her. Kind of... The woman in the book kills herself, but that bit is modelled on Richard's mother.

Clarissa suspects Richard thinks she's shallow, and maybe she is, but she has a wonderful ability to seize life's moments, and respond to them with open-hearted love and gratitude.

There's a shadow, though. She is happily partnered with Sally, but she cannot quite forget the Richard of her youth, and what might have been. It's all distilled in the memory of a kiss at dusk: "There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, to clearly promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other."

It's Richard who, like Woolf's sad veteran, Septimus Warren Smith, commits suicide at the end. He says to Clarissa: "I don't know if I can face this... The party and the ceremony, and then the hour after that, and the hour after that... The hours... One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there's another."


Woolf's Street Haunting, 1930: "... In the top rooms of these narrow old houses between Holborn and Soho, where people have such queer names, and pursue so many curious trades"

The third character -- Laura Brown, nee Zielski, the child of immigrants, the woman who still looks "foreign" despite her family's century-long residence in the United States -- is the profile that captured my imagination the most.

She's married to Dan, a war hero. He's good to her, and to their sensitive three-year-old son, Richie, and she's pregnant with another child. But Laura often feels as though she's in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing: "The war is over, the world has survived, and we are here, all of us, making homes, having and raising children, creating not just books or paintings but a whole world -- a world of order and harmony where children are safe (if not happy), where men who have seen horrors beyond imagining, who have acted bravely and well, come home to lighted windows, to perfume, to plates and napkins."

She is another one who grabs moments, sparked sometimes by mundane things such as the decoration on the blue bowl she is using to make a cake for her husband's birthday: "Laura is briefly, deeply pleased by the shadow of the bird, the bands of brilliant white and green." At such moments, she feels that "she's slipped across an invisible line, the line that has always separated her from what she would prefer to feel, who she would prefer to be... She has caught up with herself. She has worked so long, so hard, in such good faith, and now she's gotten the knack of living happily, as herself."

But, as we all know, such moments don't last. She's disappointed by her cake, so disappointed that she throws it away... I'm kind of scandalized by the waste (wouldn't it have made a pudding for another day?), but I guess the point is to chart the utter collapse of hope. She sets about making another one

She's also disappointed by her husband. He's a perfectly nice guy, but his undemanding simplicity irks her: "Why does he desire nothing, really, beyond what he's already got? ... This, she reminds herself, is a virtue."

Ray, her neighbour Kitty's husband, comes off badly in comparison with Dan. He is "somehow Kitty's version of Laura's cake, writ large". It's the era: "So many of these men are not quite what they were (no one likes to talk about it); so many women live uncomplainingly with the quirks and silences, the fits of depression, the drinking."

Kitty, meanwhile, has to go for a hospital procedure. She and Laura share a kiss. Another of those kisses that come out of the blue, and then hover in the air like the chimes of a clock.


Virginia and Leonard

Poor Laura feels she just HAS to escape for a while, so she parks Richie with a neighbour, and checks into a motel for a couple of hours, just to have time to be on her own and read. She is haunted by a sense of failure (the second cake was also disappointing). And she starts to think of how easy it would be to die... "To say to them all, I couldn't manage, you had no idea; I didn't want to try anymore." But she feels she couldn't. She still has this love of life, "at least at certain moments".

She returns, in time for her husband's birthday party. But she has the uncanny sensation that Richie knows everything: "He will always know when something is wrong. He will always know precisely when and how much she has failed."

What Richie wants, however, just like his father, is more of the same. They're not stifled by routine in the way that Laura is. But little Richie is anxious: "Like his father he senses that more of this is precisely what they may very well not get."

Even after the birthday tea, the temptation to check out is still there. Laura takes another long, lingering look at the bottle of pills. But she doesn't commit suicide. Instead, and not immediately, she runs away.

We don't find this out until the very end when she turns up at Richard's funeral... Because Richard, it turns out, is Richie... "Here," thinks Clarissa, "is the woman from Richard's poetry. Here is the lost mother, the thwarted suicide; here is the woman who walked away." Laura has read her son's books. "She knows, then... She knows that she herself, Laura Brown, is the ghost and goddess in a small body of private myths made public... She knows she has obsessed a man who might, conceivably, prove to be a significant artist."

Clarissa, "Mrs Dalloway" -- who was there to see poor Richard let himself slide out of that window, who is there to encounter this quasi-revenant -- ponders the truth that we all, ineluctably, die. "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."


Part of the last set of photos of Virginia Woolf, taken by Gisele Freund, 1939. Woolf hated being photographed... But Freund (who was associated with Sylvia Beach and company) came with recommendations from James Joyce and Vita Sackville-West

The theme of mental anguish is repeated across the three cameos. It's bound up with the idea of "enough", and the difficult relationship some of us have with that concept. Feeling we have enough is a good way to stave off depression. But how hard it is to hang on to that feeling of sufficiency... How ready Olive Kitteridge's squid head always stands, waiting to shoot out its contentment-destroying blackness.

Here's Woolf: "It has been only a few hours, and yet what she felt in the kitchen with Vanessa -- that potent satisfaction, that blessedness -- has so utterly evaporated it might never have occurred... It is enough she tells herself. She strives to believe that. It is enough to be in this house, delivered from the war, with a night's reading ahead of her, and then sleep, and the work again in the morning."

Clarissa Vaughan also experiences this brief yet wonderful sense of happiness: "Sally hands the flowers to her and for a moment they are both simply and entirely happy... They have managed, somehow, over the course of eighteen years, to continue loving each other. It is enough. At this moment, it is enough." Despite her regrets and insecurities, Clarissa is perhaps the one best able to hold on to this sense of sufficiency.

And yet even she struggles with a fear of unravelling, as a participant at a meeting with the author of The Hours pointed out: "This fear seemed essential to the character -- however life-loving -- and to the book. Cunningham agreed; the fear came directly from himself. 'There's no need to be coy about it, I'm a depressive. Always have been.' The notion of 'facing down hopelessness' came from his own experience."

It's Laura who struggles most palpably to retain the equilibrium of contentment: "What if that moment at dinner... were enough? What if you decided to want no more?" But at some point she decides she just can't bear her life of domesticity any longer.

Cunningham commented that the figure of Laura seemed to have particularly resonated with readers: "I lost track of the number of women who came up to me afterwards and said: 'I did that, and no one has ever written about a woman who does that with any kind of empathy.'"

What a beautiful book. What an exquisitely empathetic rendering of three lives.