The Hours Chapter 20: Mrs. Woolf Summary

  • Back at home in her house in Richmond, Virginia sits with a book and thinks excitedly of everything she'll do once she and Leonard are living in London again.
  • As her thoughts turn back to the kiss that she shared with Vanessa that afternoon, Virginia makes some final decisions about her heroine, Clarissa Dalloway, who's going to have loved and kissed a woman just once when she was young, and who'll "carry the memory of that kiss, the soaring hope of it, all her life" (20.7).
  • As Virginia gets up to walk around, Leonard tells her that she should go to bed by eleven o'clock at the latest.
  • Virginia agrees, then wanders into the empty dining room, where she stands lost in thought as she pieces together the plot of Mrs. Dalloway.