The
Hours interweaves the
lives of three women, the writer Virginia Woolf in 1923 when she was writing Mrs Dalloway and suffering a recurring bout of depression, a married
woman called Laura Brown who lives in 1940s Los Angeles, and Clarissa Vaughan, a successful New York publisher living in the 1990s. Just as Virginia Woolf’s novel, Mrs Dalloway, takes place on one day, The Hours follows one
day in the lives of these three
women and how each of their lives inter-connect. While the links between the three women are more apparent for those who have read Mrs Dalloway, the
novel is equally as clever without this knowledge as the strands of these women’s lives and the emotions they experience take the reader on a compelling psychological journey. Each of the women are at an emotionally significant crossroads in their lives. Virginia Woolf is just beginning her new novel and suffering the pain of depression and the stifling effect of living away from London in the suburbs. Clarissa, a modern day Mrs Dalloway, is giving a party for her friend who is dying of AIDS and is trying to mask her own unhappiness by filling her day with arrangements, and Laura is struggling to live up to the expectations of her as a stay-at-home wife and mother pregnant with her second child. The novel is particularly intuitive about what it sometimes feels like to be a woman who is dissatisfied with life. It is about the way we fill the hours of our lives and what we feel gives us purpose. Despite flitting from one woman’s experience to the next, the reader never feels a sense of disjointedness. Rather, it is the skilful weaving together of the women’s lives, transcending the boundaries of time, that makes this book so powerful.
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