'The Hours' is an
interwoven tale of three women affected by Virginia Woolf's novel, 'Mrs Dalloway' -- Virginia Woolf's bout
of depression while writing the novel, Mrs Brown who read the novel as she planning for his husband's birthday party, and Clarissa Vaughn who is also planning a victory for her former lover Richard who is dying of AIDS. Cunningham employed the same literary technique used by Woolf in her novel. The
interwoven lives of the these three women are set in different periods but the vignettes captured is set in a day. With this technique, Cunningham mirrored Woolf's attempt to show the beauty and profundity of every day -even the most ordinary- in every person's life and conversely how a person's whole life can be examined through the prism of one single day. Cunnigham also employed the stream-of-conciousness narrative style deviced by Woolf and her contemporary James Joyce. With stream-of-conciousness, the flowing thoughts and perceptions of protagonists are depicted as they would occur in real life, unfiltered, flitting from one thing to another, and often rather unpredictable.
Gender issue is also brought in this novel. The three main characters are lesbians and/or bisexual. Virginia Woolf was noted for having a relationship with women; Mrs Brown kissed Kitty in the kitchen; and Clarrisa is
lesbian and once had a relationship with gay lover, Richard.