The Hours Study Guide

Michael Cunningham was born in Ohio and grew up in Southern California. He studied English at Stanford and went on to obtain an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he began to publish his first short stories. While his early works received awards and critical acclaim, particularly his novel A Home at the End of the World, Cunningham’s breakthrough novel was The Hours (1998), which won the Pulitzer Prize and brought his work to a wider audience. Cunningham also wrote the screenplay for 2002 film adaptation of The Hours, which further increased the popularity of the novel, and which led to Nicole Kidman winning a Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Virginia Woolf. Cunningham has continued to write stories, novels, screenplays, and nonfiction, with his most recent novel, Day, dealing with a family affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. He currently lectures on English literature at Yale University.

Although Cunningham takes some creative liberties with his lightly fictionalized version of Virginia Woolf in The Hours, the broad outlines of her life in the novel are the same as her real life. Virginia Woolf’s story is bookended by the two World Wars, with her beginning to write Mrs. Dalloway shortly after World War I and her dying by suicide in the early years of World War II. This tumultuous time in European history helped shape the development of modernist literature, an experimental movement that tried to make sense of a changing world and in which Woolf was a key figure. Laura Brown’s story takes place shortly after the end of World War II. In her story, Laura feels stifled and unfulfilled by the domestic responsibilities society expects of her. In her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, feminist writer and activist Betty Friedan would later challenge the notion that women like Laura should find total fulfilment in their roles as wives and mothers. Scholars credit Freidan’s book with kicking off second-wave feminism, though this wouldn’t happen until over a decade after Laura’s story takes place.  The final story chronologically, which follows Clarissa, takes place against the backdrop of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the United States, which began in 1981 and led to the increased stigmatization of homosexuality across the country, as the disease was particularly prominent among gay men. At the height of the epidemic, many activists accused the administration of current president Ronald Reagan of failing to act on the virus. By the 1990s, advancements in medical technology led to much better survival outcomes for people living with HIV , although this didn’t help people with advanced forms of illness (like the character Richard in The Hours), and the disease continues to persist as one of the most serious illnesses for certain parts of the world.

Cunningham’s The Hours draws heavily on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, recreating some elements of the plot and theme, featuring several characters who read the novel, and even including a fictionalized version of Virginia Woolf herself, depicted in The Hours during the time in which she was writing the novel. The Hours was originally Woolf’s title for an earlier draft of Mrs. Dalloway, and Cunningham references several other works by Woolf. Most notably, Cunningham refers to Woolf’s essay in defense of modernist writing, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (where the last name of the character Laura Brown comes from), as well as Woolf’s feminist essay A Room of One’s Own, which is particularly relevant to the events of Laura’s story, in which she rents a hotel room to have time to herself to read Mrs. Dalloway. Many critics consider Mrs. Dalloway to be Woolf’s response to Ulysses by James Joyce (which also takes place during a single day in June). The Hours is one of several novels from around the turn of the millennium that reinterprets an older classic novel, including Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding (inspired by Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice) and On Beauty by Zadie Smith (inspired by E. M. Forster’s Howards End).