The Hours, Michael Cunningham (1998)

In 1920s London, Virginia Woolf is fighting against her rebellious spirit as she attempts to make a start on her new novel. A young wife and mother, broiling in a suburb of late 1940s Los Angeles, yearns to escape and read her precious copy of ‘Mrs Dalloway’. And Clarissa Vaughan steps out of her smart Greenwich Village apartment in 1990s New York to buy flowers for a party she is hosting for a dying friend.

Moving effortlessly across the decades and between England and America, this exquisite novel intertwines the stories of three unforgettable women.

Reviews

‘Cunningham has found an American tone which is exhilaratingly modern – tense, tender and completely without strain/’ (David Hare, The Guardian)

‘An absorbingly moving triptych, beautifully crafted across three time frames – from Woolf’s 1920s Richmond to 1990s Manhattan.’ (The Guardian)

‘Engrossing, imaginative and humane. For those familiar with ‘Mrs Dalloway’, the surprise is at Cunningham’s deftness and ingenuity.’ (Richard Francis, The Observer)

‘Extremely moving, original and memorable.’ (Hermione Lee, Times Literary Supplement; biographer of Virginia Woolf)

‘This chamber piece rhapsodises on creativity and madness, love and loss.’ (Esquire)

‘A sensitive marriage of intelligence, integrity and finely textured emotions.’ (Sunday Times)

‘It is not a pastiche of ‘Mrs Dalloway’, but a transplanting: an exquisitely written, kaleidoscopic work that anchors a floating post-modern world on pre-modern caissons of love, grief and transcendent longing.’ (Los Angeles Times)

Prizes

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1999T, the PEN/ Faulkner Award, 1999

Adaptations

• Screenplay by David Hare (2002), filmed as ’The Hours’ (2002), directed by Stephen Daldry, with Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman. Music by Philip Glass (at times becomes more taut, agitated, tenser…….then subsides) More expanded in places (eg. Richmond Station), more explicit at times. Interior monologues translated into outward expression or visual forms. Louis in film: not ridiculous, nor even sentimental. Leonard shown as being than a carer, or caretaker…rather a guardian, or even jailer to Virginia? Leonard on the side of Nelly, the cook, rather than Virginia in one scene.
• Opera by Kevin Puts, performed at the MET, New York, November 2002. Broadcast on BBC Radio 3 Dec 10, 2022 and Austrian OE1 Dec 17, 2022. The opera establishes first the three stories, then lets them overlap on a 3-set revolving stage. Opening is mysterious, magical, eerie: with inner voices. Music for Clarissa is radiant, lyrical, for Virginia Woolf sombre, with elegiac sub-tones, and for Laura dreamy. For Richard the music is tortured, tormented. We hear the water rippling and bubbling: the River Stour in which Virginia drowns herself; the piano is used for shattering effect in places; bells chime and ring out loudly….