The Hours, a 1998 novel by the American writer Michael Cunningham, is a tribute to Virginia Woolf's 1923 work Mrs Dalloway.

The nonlinear narrative unfolds primarily through the perspectives of three women across three decades, with each woman somehow affected by Woolf's novel Mrs.

[1] In 1923 Richmond, London, author Virginia Woolf writes Mrs. Dalloway and struggles with mental illness.

In 1949 in Los Angeles, California, Laura Brown is reading Mrs. Dalloway while planning a birthday party for her husband, a World War II veteran.

In 1999 in New York City, Clarissa Vaughan plans a party to celebrate a major literary award received by her good friend and former lover, the poet Richard, who is dying of an AIDS-related illness.

Cunningham's novel mirrors Mrs. Dalloway's stream-of-consciousness narrative style, which Woolf and James Joyce pioneered.

The protagonists' flowing thoughts and perceptions are depicted as they would occur in real life, and the characters interact with the present and with memories; this contextualizes personal history and backstory, such as buying flowers and baking a cake, which otherwise might appear trivial.

Leonard Woolf, her husband, finds her suicide note, and Virginia's body floats downstream, where life continues as normal.

In New York City at the end of the 20th century, Clarissa Vaughan announces she will buy flowers for a party she is hosting later in the day for her friend Richard, a renowned poet who is dying of an AIDS-related illness, because he has won the Carrouthers Prize, an esteemed poetry prize.

[2] Clarissa leaves her partner Sally to walk to the flower shop, enjoying the everyday life of the city.

Clarissa enters Richard's apartment building, which she finds squalid and associates with a sense of decay and death.

Virginia longs to return home; she is aware she is more susceptible to mental illness in London, but would rather die "raving mad" in the city than avoid life in Richmond.

As Virginia returns home she feels she is impersonating herself in an effort to convince herself and others she is sane so Leonard will agree to move back to London.

As Clarissa prepares for the party, she thinks of the famous actor Sally is lunching with, a B-movie action star who recently came out as gay.

[1] Virginia Woolf was known to have affairs with women; Laura Brown kisses Kitty in her kitchen; and Clarissa Vaughan, who was previously Richard's lover, is in a relationship with Sally.

[citation needed] Apart from the novel's three female protagonists, and the three symbiotic storylines that they appear in, there are other examples in the novel where Cunningham patterns his story on groups of three.

In the "Mrs Woolf" storyline there is a factual grouping of three in Vanessa's children, Quentin, Julian, and Angelica, who come with their mother to visit Virginia.