6 May 2025, The Hours, Michael Cunningham, 2006
The Hours was Virginia Woolf’s working title for what became Mrs Dalloway and Michael Cunningham’s novel is clearly inspired by this, one of Woolf’s best-known novels. There are many references to Woolf’s life and writing in The Hours and indeed she features as one of the three women whose interior life he carefully examines and reveals. Cunningham draws obvious parallels with Mrs Dalloway, refracting the women’s lives through one single day: Virginia in 1920s London starting to write Mrs Dalloway; Laura in 1940’s Los Angeles, trying to escape suffocating domesticity with her precious copy of Mrs Dalloway; and Clarissa in 1990s New York, preparing a party for a dying friend. His writing is rich and subtle, deft, economic and beautifully crafted. Although it pays homage to Mrs Dalloway, it is not derivative. Neither is it necessary to have read Mrs Dalloway to understand and appreciate The Hours. There was no dissent about this book, the intensity of the interior lives lived, the connections between the women, the unexpected finale were engaging, stimulating and transporting. One reviewer opined that Cunningham’s book ‘heightens the perception of the reader’ and as readers we certainly found ourselves alert and empathetic to each woman in her world and to the resonances between them. Notwithstanding its intensity, it is book that would bear re-reading and doubtless one that would reveal more the second time around.