Virginia places a large stone in her pocket and wades into the river, swept downstream to her death.

Clarissa Vaughan leaves her apartment to buy flowers for a party celebrating her friend Richard's poetry prize.

Virginia Woolf wakes in her Richmond home with a new idea for the opening of her novel Mrs. Dalloway.

Laura Brown lies in bed reading Mrs. Dalloway on her husband Dan's birthday, postponing domestic duties she dreads.

Clarissa visits Richard in his squalid apartment and finds him reluctant to attend the party she is throwing in his honor.

Virginia finishes her morning writing session and decides her protagonist Mrs. Dalloway will die by suicide.

Laura and her neighbor Kitty share a brief, charged kiss that floods Laura with desire and shame.

Virginia's sister Vanessa arrives early with her three children, and the group attends to a dying bird in the garden.

Richard's former long-term partner Louis makes an unannounced visit to Clarissa's apartment.

Laura checks into a downtown hotel room and reads Mrs. Dalloway, feeling temporarily free from her constrained life.

Virginia slips away from Hogarth House at night and walks toward the train station, intending to go to London.

Richard slides from his apartment windowsill to his death as Clarissa begs him to come inside.

Laura watches Dan show Richie how to cut the birthday cake, feeling this may be the one perfect moment of her life.

Laura handles a full bottle of sleeping pills and fantasizes about ending her suffering once and for all.

Clarissa returns home with the elderly Laura Brown, who is revealed to be Richard's mother and a suicide attempt survivor.

The Hours follows three women across different decades, each bound to Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway on a single June day. Virginia Woolf's suicide in the prologue frames the entire novel with mortality, while her 1923 chapters trace her struggle to write the book that will echo through the other two lives. In 1949 Los Angeles, Laura Brown chafes against her domestic life and is unsettled by a charged encounter with her neighbor Kitty, setting her on a collision course with crisis. In 1990s New York, Clarissa Vaughan buys flowers for her dying friend Richard's party while wrestling with aging, memory, and the roads not taken. Richard's death shatters the day Clarissa had carefully constructed and forces her into a confrontation with what her life has actually been. The novel closes when Laura Brown appears at Clarissa's door, revealed as Richard's long-lost mother, and Clarissa finally accepts her own ordinary but genuine existence.

The key events that drive the novel's three interwoven storylines.

Leonard Woolf finds Virginia's suicide note and rushes to the river, finding only a fisherman in a red jacket.

Clarissa encounters the novelist Walter Hardy in a plaza and invites him and his partner Evan to Richard's party.

Leonard insists Virginia eat breakfast; she compromises by agreeing to eat lunch instead so she can write all morning.

Dan Brown buys roses for his own birthday before Laura can, and greets her cheerfully in the kitchen.

Richard confesses to Clarissa that he always secretly believed himself a genius and now fears he has completely failed.

Virginia describes her migraines as a realm of relentless brilliance and admits she would rather risk her health in London than fade in Richmond.

Laura and her son Richie bake a birthday cake together, and she inadvertently makes him cry by saying "oopsie."

Laura throws away the disappointing first birthday cake and starts baking a second one from scratch.

Virginia changes her mind and decides Mrs. Dalloway will not die, reserving that fate for a suffering genius instead.

Julia arrives home with the queer theorist Mary Krull, and Clarissa and Mary exchange thinly veiled hostility.

Leonard finds Virginia on the road near the train station and walks her back to Hogarth House.

Sally has lunch with the actor Oliver St. Ives and Walter Hardy, feeling excluded from the men's plans.

Sally rushes home from lunch and buys Clarissa flowers, overwhelmed by a sudden fear of one day losing her.

Virginia convinces Leonard at dinner to move the household back to London, where she can pursue her literary life.

Clarissa and Laura Brown hold hands and acknowledge that they both did the best they could for Richard.

Behind the major turning points of The Hours lies a series of quieter events that reveal the full texture of each woman's day. Leonard Woolf is helpless to prevent Virginia's suicide despite his devotion, and in 1923 he monitors her health and negotiates over meals while she fights to reclaim her London literary life. Laura's domestic world is defined by small failures and strained performances, from a lopsided birthday cake to the painful task of being a loving wife for a husband she struggles to connect with. Clarissa navigates her social world with practiced charm, maintaining friendships and throwing parties even as she grapples with Richard's illness and her own fading sense of importance. Sally's parallel storyline reveals quieter anxieties beneath the surface of Clarissa's life, as she confronts her fear of loss and the limits of what she and Clarissa share. Together these secondary events expose the private costs of the lives each woman has chosen and the gap between the selves they perform and the selves they carry inside.

The quieter but essential moments behind each woman's main storyline.

Virginia feels sorry for Leonard as she walks to the river but presses on, knowing she will not get another chance.

Clarissa stops at the flower shop and feels a moment of perfect happiness greeting the florist Barbara with a kiss.

Virginia sits at her desk and writes the opening line: "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself."

Laura forces herself into the kitchen to greet Dan on his birthday, suppressing her irritation and her desire to go back upstairs.

Richard describes his hallucinated voices as dark, electrified jellyfish that sing to him in ancient Greek.

Laura decides to embrace her domestic life and stop mourning the literary life she set aside when she married.

Virginia walks outside planning that Mrs. Dalloway will share a girlhood love with a girl before choosing a man and dying.

Clarissa recalls her happiest memory—a kiss with Richard by a pond at dusk—knowing it can never be recaptured.

Kitty visits Laura and reveals she must go to the hospital for three days to have a uterine growth examined.

Virginia imagines herself as the dead bird lying in its bed of roses, an ornament on a trivial thing fated to die.

Louis admits to Clarissa that he has fallen in love with a student again and begins crying about the scarcity of love.

Laura contemplates suicide in the hotel room but vows not to act on the fantasy, knowing it would destroy her family.

Laura returns late to collect Richie from the neighbor's house and realizes he can see through her lie about where she was.

Richard tells Clarissa the endless procession of hours has become too much for him to endure while he is so ill.

Clarissa realizes that with Richard gone, no one will call her Mrs. Dalloway anymore, and she is finally free to be herself.

The Hours is built on moments of revelation where each woman's inner crisis comes into sharp, undeniable focus. Virginia's suicide in the prologue is both an act of defeat and a final assertion of will, establishing death as the horizon against which all three storylines unfold. Virginia's decision to write Mrs. Dalloway and her evolving plan for the novel's characters track her growing fatalism about genius and illness, culminating in a kiss with Vanessa that captures everything elusive and irrecoverable she has been chasing. For Laura, the hotel room becomes the space where she confronts her true desires most honestly, while Kitty's visit and its charged aftermath expose the depth of her repressed sexuality and the impossibility of her present life. Clarissa's storyline is haunted by the memory of a single kiss with Richard and shaped by her growing dread about what his illness means for both of them. Richard's final confession from the windowsill delivers the novel's emotional climax, and Clarissa's quiet realization at the close—that she is no longer Mrs. Dalloway and never need be again—offers the only liberation the novel allows.

The discoveries, decisions, and emotional breakthroughs that define each woman's fate.