It seems like a tricky novel to film, with much of the beauty of the novel in Cunningham’s prose as well as the alternating narration of the three women characters.

Virginia Woolf, one of the characters says, “I am not a writer, just a gifted eccentric.”įirst published in 1989, a new edition of The Hours is being re-released by Picador to coincide with the debut of the much-heralded motion picture a few weeks ago, starring Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf, Meryl Streep as Clarrisa Vaughan and Julianne Moore as Laura Brown. The feeling that creativity goes along with a sense of failure is replete throughout the book. Cunningham believes that almost everyone is a creator of some sort, just as he feels that Woolf believed it too. And sure enough, in The Hours, Cunningham pays tribute to all acts of creation that the three main women characters indulge in, be it a book, a party, or a cake. Woolf understood that most of our lives look ordinary from the outside. Dalloway ” and a tribute to what he terms “the first great book he ever read.” The Hours won him the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 and is nothing less than a literary feat that Cunningham has achieved effortlessly and with grace.Ĭunningham says that a significant part of Woolf’s greatness lies in her insistence that there are no ordinary lives, just inadequate ways of looking at them. The author calls it a “riff on British novelist Virginia Woolf’s Mrs.

In his stunning novel, The Hours, Michael Cunningham draws from the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the stories of three women during an apparently unremarkable yet pivotal day of their lives. “Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.”

Michael cunningham the hours