“Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again.” These are the first words of Virginia Woolf’s suicide letter. After suffering from a mental disorder that infected her mind with piercing headaches and ravaged her body with neglect, Virginia walked into a river with stones in her pocket to weigh her down in a river near her home in Sussex. Before writing the suicide letter, Woolf wrote a brief powerhouse of a novel, “Mrs. Dalloway,” which inspired Michael Cunningham to write “The Hours,” the book I am trying desperately hard to keep from reviewing with a series of erratic, high-pitched raves.
First, you must know one thing: Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. This is the opening of “Mrs. Dalloway,” and an excellent motif woven into the stories of the three women on whom “The Hours” is based. While Virginia Woolf actually existed (this shouldn’t be news to those of you who took something at least halfway resembling an English class), the two other women in Cunningham’s incandescently original concept of interconnecting stories are fictitious. Their names are Laura Brown and Clarissa Vaughan.
The women take turns in the novel living their lives, contemplating the hours ahead of them in each chapter.
Virginia has a novel to write about the day of a woman planning a party, but her constant headaches and discontent with being away from London are becoming impossible to bear.
Laura, a suburban housewife in the ’50s, is torn between planning the perfect birthday for her husband and contemplating the perfect kiss she had with a neighbor. Clarissa, a modern-day woman living and loving the big city, is preparing for the awards ceremony of her best friend who is losing his mental health through AIDS.
While there are obvious connections between these three admirable and interesting women, the conclusion of the novel connects them all in a thoroughly unexpected result of Cunningham’s genius.
The inherent themes of perfection, marriage, friendship and ambiguous sexuality flow through heartrending paragraphs and voracious lines that can be read with satisfaction and ease.
It took me seven hours to read “The Hours,” which is fairly admirable (and debatably sad).
Spend a minute or two of your time reading this addictive, 228-page tribute to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (which has now taken me seven hours to get through page nine). Be warned, however. The themes I mentioned in the novel might make the average conservative squirm.
Regardless of how open or close-minded the reader, I can say with morbid glee that this book, its Academy Award-winning adaptation, and Virginia Woolf herself will outlive us all.

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