The Hours

Laura Brown, fictional California wife and mother in Michael Cunningham's novel The Hours, is obsessed with Mrs. Dalloway. Distracted from her daily chores in 1951's Lost Angeles, she finds it hard to stop reading the famous, ground-breaking novel.

Mrs. Dalloway was published in 1925. By that time, Virginia Woolf was already showing the effects of her bouts with mental illness even as her country was feeling the effects of World War I.

Laura Brown, living her life in Los Angeles, could relate to Clarissa Dalloway. Her country was also recovering from war. But Laura had a serious problem: She was beginning to blur the fictional world of Mrs. Dalloway with the realty of her own life.