The Story in Brief
Three women on three different days across three different decades, each connected by Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs Dalloway. Virginia Woolf herself in Richmond in 1923, writing the opening of the novel that will eventually bear her name. Laura Brown in suburban Los Angeles in 1951, reading that novel and finding in it something that both sustains and imperils her. Clarissa Vaughan in contemporary New York, planning a party for her friend Richard — a poet dying of AIDS who calls her Mrs Dalloway. Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a meditation on time, depression, and the costs of living fully that echoes Woolf's prose rhythms in its own. Stephen Daldry's 2002 film, with Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, and Meryl Streep, won five Academy Awards and remains one of the finest literary adaptations of the 2000s.
Key Differences
Cunningham's prose and Woolf's echo
Cunningham writes in a style that consciously echoes Woolf — the long, sinuous sentences, the attention to interior states, the way a moment of ordinary perception opens into something larger. The novel asks to be read slowly, sentence by sentence, in the way that Woolf's own fiction asks to be read. This experience of reading as an echo of reading — encountering Woolf through Cunningham through Woolf — is irreplicable on screen. The film captures the emotional architecture without the prose dimension that makes the novel formally distinctive.
Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf
Kidman won the Academy Award wearing a prosthetic nose and giving a performance of extraordinary interior precision — Virginia Woolf's depression rendered as a weather system, a texture of consciousness rather than a set of symptoms. The decision to use prosthetics was controversial and the performance transcended the controversy. Cunningham's Woolf is rendered in prose that approximates her own interior monologue; Kidman renders it in silence and movement. Both approaches are remarkable.
Julianne Moore's Laura Brown
Moore's Laura is the film's most emotionally devastating performance — a woman trapped in a life she cannot inhabit, reading a novel that opens a door she is terrified to walk through. The scene in the hotel room, where Laura considers an exit from everything, is the film's most difficult sequence and Moore plays it with a restraint that makes it more painful than any more demonstrative approach would. Cunningham's Laura is rendered with equal care in the novel, but Moore's face adds a dimension the prose cannot have.
Philip Glass's score
Glass's minimalist score — repetitive, accumulative, hypnotic — is one of the finest film scores of the 2000s and does work in the film that Cunningham's prose rhythms do in the novel. Both create a sense of time moving at a particular pace, of ordinary moments carrying unusual weight. The score is not an illustration of the novel but a cinematic equivalent of its formal ambition. This is the film's most significant addition to the source.
The three timelines
Cunningham intercuts the three stories throughout the novel — moving from Woolf to Laura to Clarissa in a rhythm that builds connections across time. Daldry preserves this structure and David Hare's screenplay finds elegant transitions between the three worlds. The film's most formal achievement is making the three timelines feel simultaneous rather than sequential — the sense that these three women are somehow living the same day at the same time.
Should You Read First?
Either order works — this is one of the site's genuine ties and both versions are essential. Read first for Cunningham's prose rhythms and the specific experience of encountering Woolf through his echo of her. Watch first if you want the three performances as your mental images while reading. Both are correct choices. If you have read Mrs Dalloway, read The Hours before seeing the film; if you haven't, the film is the better entry point.
Cunningham wrote a novel of formal ambition and emotional precision — prose rhythms that echo Woolf across half a century. Daldry made one of the great ensemble films of the 2000s, with three performances that are collectively extraordinary and a Glass score that does in music what Cunningham does in prose. Read the novel. See the film. Both are necessary versions of the same argument about what it costs to live consciously. A genuine tie.