Clarissa ( Meryl Streep), who we meet in the present, is living as a lesbian she and her partner ( Allison Janney) are raising a daughter ( Claire Danes) and caring for their friend Richard ( Ed Harris), now dying of AIDs.

A surprising kiss midway through her story suggests she might have been happier living as a lesbian. Reilly) she does not love, and a son who might as well be from outer space. Laura ( Julianne Moore), whom we meet in the 1950s, is a typical suburban housewife with a loving and dependable husband ( John C. In 'The Hours,' Woolf ( Nicole Kidman) has a room of her own, and the understanding of her husband, Leonard ( Stephen Dillane), a publisher.

Austen wrote her novels, Woolf observed, in a corner of a room where all the other family activities were also taking place. Her observation was that throughout history women did not have a room of their own, but were on call throughout a house occupied by their husbands and families. It's more like a meditation on separate episodes linked by a certain sensibility-that of Woolf, a great novelist who wrote a little book titled A Room of One's Own that in some ways initiated modern feminism. 'The Hours,' directed by Stephen Daldry and based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Michael Cunningham, doesn't try to force these three stories to parallel one another. Dalloway, who presents a brave face to the world but is alone, utterly alone, within herself, and locked away from the romance she desires. Instead, they all revolve around the fictional character of Mrs. Two of the characters in the second story appear again in the third, but the stories do not flow one from another. All three stories in 'The Hours' begin with breakfast, involve preparations for parties, end in sadness. The first story in 'The Hours' shows Virginia writing about the woman, the second shows Laura reading the book, the third shows Clarissa buying flowers after having said one of the famous lines of the book. It takes place in a day during which a woman has breakfast, buys flowers and prepares to throw a party. In New York in 2001, Clarissa Vaughan watches as the man she was once married to decides whether to let himself fall out of a window, or not. In Los Angeles in 1951, Laura Brown fills her purse with pills and checks into a hotel to kill herself. In Sussex in 1941, the novelist Virginia Woolf fills the pockets of her coat with rocks and walks into a river to drown.

Mrs dalloway cliff notes