Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title. - Virginia Woolf
Um dia na vida de três mulheres, em três Eras diferentes. O suicídio de Virginia Woolf, em 1941, abre o filme, mas a acção à qual a personagem histórica é central desenrola-se em 1923, quando a escritora vivia em Richmond, com o marido Leonard, que a rodeia de cuidados extremos, devido ao seu historial de instabilidade mental. Em Los Angeles, 1951, Laura Brown, vive com o filho Richie e o marido Dan. Laura não consegue enfrentar a vida de dona de casa nos subúrbios, deprimindo-se com as mais pequenas coisas, como o seu fracasso na confecção de um bolo de aniversário ou a atenção requerida pelo filho. Nova Iorque, 2001: Clarissa Vaughan organiza uma festa para comemorar a atribuição de um importante prémio à obra poética de Richard, seu amigo, debilitado pela SIDA..............................................................
Three eras, three stories, and three women coalesce into a continuum that flows through the heart of "The Hours." Each woman is joined to the other like links in a chain, unaware that the power of a single great work of literature is irrevocably altering their lives. First there is Virginia Woolf, in a suburb of London in the early 1920s, battling insanity as she begins to write her first great novel, Mrs. Dalloway. Over two decades later, Laura Brown is a wife and mother in Los Angeles at the end of World War II, who is reading Mrs. Dalloway and finding it so revelatory that she begins to consider making a devastating change in her life. And then, in contemporary New York City, there is Clarissa Vaughan, a modern version of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, in love with her friend Richard, a brilliant poet dying of AIDS. Their stories intertwine and finally come together in a surprising and transcendent moment of shared recognition.
