The Hours Themes

Michael Cunningham’s The Hours is a novel about three women whose lives intertwine, though their stories unfold at different periods in the 20th century: a fictionalized version of the writer Virginia Woolf, Laura Brown, and Clarissa Vaughan. In one sense, the novel all takes place in a single day, starting in the morning and advancing into the night, but this “day” takes place across three different timelines, with each new chapter taking…

Each of the three main women in The Hours contemplates or dies by suicide at some point in the novel, with Virginia killing herself in the prologue and with Laura and Clarissa surviving their own suicidal impulses but having to cope with the suicide of Richard. And these characters’ actions echo the events of the novel Mrs. Dalloway, where the character Mrs. Dalloway contemplates suicide and the character Septimus ultimately dies by it)…

The women of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours are all united by the novel Mrs. Dalloway, which Virginia writes, and which Laura and Clarissa later read. For Virginia, writing is both a release and a weight on her. It provides structure to her life, occupying her thoughts even when she can’t actually be writing, but it also haunts her with the feeling that she needs to be doing more. Laura struggles with similar feelings of…