Michael Cunningham’s 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel partly inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway is The Hours.
Published in 1998, The Hours interweaves the stories of three women: Virginia Woolf in 1923, a 1950s housewife reading Mrs Dalloway, and Clarissa Vaughan in contemporary New York. Their lives are connected by Woolf’s novel, recurring themes, and parallel concerns about identity, domestic life, illness, and mortality.
Cunningham won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999. The book’s original working title was The Hours, which was also an early title Virginia Woolf considered for Mrs Dalloway.
The 2002 film adaptation starred Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, and Meryl Streep. It is important to distinguish Cunningham’s novel from Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway: The Hours is a separate work that responds to and reimagines elements of Woolf’s book.