The Hours

The Hours, an homage to Mrs. Dalloway, is replete with references to its inspiration. Some of the references are explicit—e.g., quotations—while others are allusive and are apparent only to readers familiar with Woolf’s novel. Characters, themes, symbols, and plot points from Mrs. Dalloway all reappear in The Hours, though rarely exactly as they are in Woolf’s book.

Some characters merely share a similar name—e.g., Walter Hardy’s partner Evan and Septimus Warren Smith’s dead friend Evans—while others are composites of multiple characters from Mrs. Dalloway. Richard shares Septimus’s fate—suicide by jumping out of a window—and also shares many of Woolf’s own experiences, such as attraction to others of the same sex, literary genius, and mental illness. Additionally, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is married to a Richard. This Woolfian influence is most explicit in Clarissa Vaughan, whom her friend Richard nicknames Mrs. Dalloway. He gave her this nickname because of her shared first name with that character and because, he asserted, both Clarissa and Mrs. Dalloway share a destiny of “charm” and “prosperity” (unlike, for example, such tragic heroines as Isabel Archer or Anna Karenina, whose names Clarissa might have preferred). Richard also grandly claims that the nickname is a matter of “fate,” and indeed, the nickname appears to tie Clarissa to Mrs.