The film, "The Hours", is based on a novel by Michael Cunningham. In creating his novel, Cunningham has referred to Virginia Woolf's novel, "Mrs. Dalloway", as well as to the life of Woolf herself, as shown in biographies, her letters and her diaries.

The Hours is the story of three women from three different periods who share a common feeling that they have been living their lives for someone else. Each is alive at a different time and place; all are linked by their yearnings and their fears. Virginia Woolf, in a suburb of London in the early 1920's, is battling insanity as she begins to write her novel 'Mrs Dalloway'. Laura Brown, a wife and mother in Los Angeles in 1951, is reading 'Mrs. Dalloway' and finding it so revelatory that she begins to consider making a devastating change in her life. Clarissa Vaughan, in 2001 in New York, becomes a modern-day mirror image of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway as she plans what may be the final party for her friend and former lover Richard.

Three women, therefore, in different times are linked by one novel. The film, 'The Hours', is based on a novel by John Cunningham. In creating his novel, Cunningham has referred to Virginia Woolf's novel, 'Mrs. Dalloway', as well as to the life of Woolf herself, as shown in biographies, her letters and her diaries.