The Hours

A film by Stephen Daldry, adapted from the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Michael Cunningham. Its name was also Virginia Woolf's working title of her novel Mrs Dalloway on which the story is based.

"Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself."

In 1920s London, Virginia Woolf is fighting against her rebellious spirit as she attempts to make a start on her new novel, a book which will set a trend in contemporary literature, the stream-of-consciousness novel.

Laura Brown, a young wife and mother, broiling in a suburb of 1940s Los Angeles, yearns to escape and read her precious copy of Mrs Dalloway, finding it so revelatory that she begins to consider making a devastating change in her life.

Clarissa Vaughan, a present-day version of Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, steps out of her smart Greenwich Village apartment in 1990s New York to buy flowers for a party she is hosting for a much loved friend who is dying of AIDS.

The Hours recasts the classic story of Woolf's Mrs Dalloway in a startling new light. Moving effortlessly across the decades and between England and America, this exquisite story follows the personal worlds of three unforgettable women. Their engaging stories intertwine until they come together in a surprising moment of shared recognition.

Dear Leonard —
To look life in the face
Always, to look life in the face
And to know it for what it is
At last, to know it
To love it for what it is
And then, to put it away

Leonard,
Always, the years between us
Always, the years
Always, the love
Always, the hours