Ostensibly based on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize winning The Hours differs dramatically from the literature which inspired it. Writing at the end of the modernist period, Woolf embodied many of those tenets: alienation, ambiguity, and a dissolving prose that characterized her style, while Cunningham distills the skitterish post-modern world. Quoting her diary in the epigram, he indicates his intent, as well as Woolf’s, in penning Mrs. Dalloway, tentatively named "The Hours": "I have no time to describe my plans. I should say a good deal about The Hours, and my discovery; how I must dig out beautiful caves behind my characters; I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humor, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect, & each comes to daylight at the present moment" [August 30, 1923].

Intermingling three stories — that of Clarissa Vaughn, who resides in New York in the present; Laura Browne, who contemplates her typical life in a 1950s Los Angeles suburb; and Virginia Woolf, who is recuperating from a bout of schizophrenia and anorexia in London in 1923 — Cunningham allows each personality to reveal herself fully. Woolf is the most commanding character, described by her husband (himself a writer and co-founder of their experimental Hogarth Press) Leonard Woolf: "She stands tall, haggard, marvelous in her housecoat, the coffee steaming in her hand. He is still, at times, astonished by her. She may be the most intelligent woman in England, he thinks. Her books may be read for centuries. He believes this more ardently than anyone else. And she is his wife. She is Virginia Stephen, pale and tall, startling as a Rembrandt or a Velazquez, appearing twenty years ago at her brother’s rooms in Cambridge in a white dress, and she is Virginia Woolf, standing before him right now. She has aged dramatically, just this year, as if a layer of air has leaked out from under her skin. She’s grown craggy and worn. She’s begun to look as if she’s carved from very porous, gray-white marble. She is still regal, still exquisitely formed, still possessed of her formidable lunar radiance, but she is suddenly no longer beautiful." Reminiscent of Woolf’s description of Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, Cunningham’s decorous prose is luminous.

Approximating Woolf’s free indirect discourse, this passage dissects her creativity: "It is an inner faculty that recognizes the animating mysteries of the world because it is made of the same substance, and when she is very fortunate she is able to write directly through that faculty. Writing in that state is the most profound satisfaction she knows, but her access to it comes and foes without warning." More than any other assessment, including nephew Quentin Bell’s in The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume I, Cunningham has anatomized the reason for Woolf’s early death. Critics have speculated that her childless state, her sexual ambiguity, her eating disorders, and even her paternalistic Victorian upbringing caused her suicide, "the one experience" as she told Vita Sackville-West, "I shall never write about." Cunningham captures beautifully here and throughout The Hours the centrality of Woolf’s passion for self-expression. When she felt she lost that creative power, she ended her life.

Concerned that she would be perceived as shrill and Sapphic after publishing A Room of One’s Own in 1929, Woolf both feared and embraced her bisexuality. Cunningham explores the multiplicity of feelings in both straight and gay relationships. While Clarissa Vaughn, dubbed Clarissa Dalloway by her friend Richard, leaves her lover Sally to scrub the bathroom, Laura Browne reflects after Kitty’s illicit kiss: "Love is deep, a mystery — but who wants to understand its every particular? Laura desires Kitty. She desires her force, her brisk and cheerful disappointment, the shifting gold-pink lights of her secret self and the crisp shampooed depths of her hair. Laura desires Dan, too, in a darker less exquisite way; a way that is more subtly haunted by cruelty and shame. Still it is a desire sharp as a bone chip. She can kiss Kitty in the kitchen and love her husband too. She can anticipate the queasy pleasure of her husband’s lips and fingers [is it that she desires his desire?] and still dream of kissing Kitty again someday, in a kitchen or at the beach as children shriek in the surf, in a hallway with their arms full of folded towels, laughing softly, aroused, hopeless, in love with their own recklessness if not each other, saying Shhhh, parting quickly, going on." By not fully explaining — and perhaps imploding — the subtleties of this moment, Cunningham indeed captures Woolf’s exploratory style. The reader too desires to explore Kitty’s "shifting gold-pink lights of her secret self," yet both Cunningham and Woolf take us beyond the precipice; they create a situation with enough detail that the reader’s imagination can complete their arresting images.