The Hours Themes

It's probably not going to come as a surprise to you that time is a major theme in a book called The Hours. As characters go about their lives in the novel, some of them feel intensely grateful for...

If Haddaway is still looking for someone to tell him what love is, he could do worse than hitting up The Hours for a clue. Love comes in many shapes throughout the novel: we see romantic love betwe...

With one of its main narratives set at "the end of the twentieth century" (1.2), a time when gay communities in America were still being devastated by the AIDS crisis, The Hours is a testament to o...

Like Mick Jagger, Laura Brown, a suburban housewife living in late 1940s Los Angeles, just can't get no satisfaction. That's a common theme in The Hours, but more than any other character in the no...

Among the many everyday tragedies that The Hours explores, illness is one of the most devastating. The novel's late-twentieth-century narrative grapples with the impact of the AIDS crisis in New Yo...

The Hours is a bookish book, the kind of book English majors will go nuts over. And by that, we mean that this is a book about the beauty and value of books. Michael Cunningham has explained that b...

At one point in The Hours, Michael Cunningham has Virginia Woolf wonder if "a single day in the life of an ordinary woman [can] be made into enough for a novel" (5.2). In another passage, the narra...

Both Virginia Woolf and Laura Brown live in suburban homes that they dislike, and both women struggle with feelings of inadequacy in their roles as homemakers and household managers. Clarissa Vaugh...