The Hours

I was obsessed with this novel when it first came out, and every time I go back to it, it offers me another gift.

The writing is lean yet elegant, a perfect combination to tell such a heartbreaking story—of three women connected through time by Virginia Woolf’s singular novel Mrs. Dalloway.

It’s a book about how to sustain ourselves through challenging times—how to literally survive—but it’s also a treatise on creating remarkable characters, the call to be an artist, and a rare glimpse into the imagined writing process of one of the English language’s greatest wordsmiths. (I’m referring to… show more.

The Hours tells a story of three women throughout time and their connection to Mrs. Dalloway as they deal with death, sickness, and growing old. In this snapshot of these three women’s lives, we see their meditations on their various life transitions, including their contemplations of death.

CW: suicide

In The Hours, Cunningham masterfully weaves together the stories of three women who will never meet, yet are connected through the influence of Virginia Woolf (one of the three) on their lives. Cunningham shows how art—in this case, Mrs. Dalloway, one of Woolf’s most brilliant novels—can have a profound influence that the artist could never have predicted and will never know.  As someone striving to produce her own art (in my case, through novels about the impact of art on human lives) that speaks to me in a very deep way, and gives me hope.

This was one of those books I picked up early one night and read in one shot, a rare phenomenon for me in our age of distraction. It's a good way to experience the book because there's so much stream-of-consciousness and, while it has chapters, it's better not to break the flow. The book is complex and serves as a great companion piece to Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. However, you don't really need to know Mrs. Dalloway to appreciate this book (I didn't my first time through) and Cunningham skillfully weaves the various storylines together while drawing enough thematic… show more.