THE HOURS is the story of three women searching for more potent, meaningful lives. Each is alive at a differnt time and place, all are linked by their yearnings and their fears.

Virginia Woolf, in a suburb of London in the early 1920's, is battling insanity as she begins to write her first great novel, "Mrs. Dalloway".

Laura Brown, a wife and mother in Los Angeles at the end of World War Two, is reading "Mrs. Dalloway", and finding it so revelatory that she begins to consider making a devastating changes in her life.

Clarissa Vaughan, a contemporary version of Woolf's Mrs/ Dalloway, lives in New York City today, and is in love with her friend Richard, a brilliant poet who is dying of AIDS.

Their stories inertwine, and finally come together in a surprisingm transcendent moment of shared recognition.