Why Is It Called The Hours? Because Woolf Called It That First
The Hours is named after a title Virginia Woolf threw away. “The Hours” was her own working title for Mrs Dalloway — she drafted the whole novel under it in 1922–24 before changing the name to its heroine for publication. Decades later, Michael Cunningham picked the discarded title back up for his 1998 novel, and Stephen Daldry’s film kept it. So the name isn’t decoration: it’s the single clearest proof that The Hours is a conversation with Mrs Dalloway, not just a story like it.
The short answer
Both the 1998 novel by Michael Cunningham and the 2002 film by Stephen Daldry are called The Hours because that was Virginia Woolf’s original working title for Mrs Dalloway. While Woolf was writing the novel between 1922 and 1924, she referred to it as The Hours in her diaries and across the three notebooks of her draft. Only at publication, on 14 May 1925, did it become Mrs Dalloway.
When Cunningham wrote a novel that braids three women’s lives around Woolf and her book, he reached back and took the name she had let go. It is the most elegant move in the whole pairing: the later text is literally built out of something the earlier one discarded.
Why Woolf chose “The Hours” — and then dropped it
Woolf’s first jotting, in August 1922, was vaguer still: a book “to be called, perhaps, At Home: or The Party.” But by that November she had landed on something sharper. She considered organising the whole novel by the hour and calling it The Hours — because time is the book’s true subject. Big Ben tolls through the single June day, and at each chime the characters feel, as Woolf put it, the leaden circles of the sound dissolving in the air: the hours counting them toward death.
So why change it? As she wrote, the book’s gravity shifted from the abstract to the human — from the hours themselves to the woman moving through them. Mrs Dalloway puts a person on the cover, and that is the point: Woolf’s great innovation was to show that a whole life lives inside one ordinary consciousness. The title followed the focus. But the hours never left; they simply went underground, tolling beneath every chapter-less page.
Why Cunningham took the name back
Michael Cunningham first read Mrs Dalloway at fifteen, and never got over it — by his own account, “I was lost. I was gone. I never recovered.” His 1998 novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize, is that lifelong response made into a book: three women across three eras, each living a single day shaped by Woolf’s novel. Calling it The Hours does two things at once. It pays homage — handing Woolf’s abandoned title back to her — and it announces the project, telling you before you read a word that this is a story about her story.
The film makes the wink explicit: when the dying poet Richard greets the modern Clarissa, he calls her “Mrs Dalloway.” The character knows she is living inside a conversation with Woolf’s novel. So does the title above her.
What “the hours” actually means
On the surface, hours are just units of time. In both works they are something heavier: the measure of a life as it is spent. To live is to use up hours, and the great anxiety running through both texts is that an ordinary day — flowers, a party, a cake — might not amount to enough against the certainty of death. Septimus, and later Richard, answer that anxiety by stepping out of the hours entirely. Clarissa, in both centuries, answers it by filling them — by insisting that this afternoon, this gathering, is worth the trouble of living.
For HSC Module A, the title is the most concentrated piece of evidence you have. Textual Conversations asks how a later text speaks to an earlier one; here, the later text’s very name is a line Woolf wrote and crossed out. Open an essay on the title and you have already proved the conversation exists — before you analyse a single scene. That is why the strongest responses treat The Hours not as a tribute that borrowed a nice phrase, but as a text that picks up Woolf’s discarded hours and keeps counting them.
Quick quiz
Four questions on the title behind the title.
Frequently asked questions
Why is The Hours called The Hours?
Because “The Hours” was Virginia Woolf’s working title for Mrs Dalloway while she drafted it in 1922–24. Cunningham took the discarded title for his 1998 novel, and Daldry’s film kept it.
Was The Hours originally Mrs Dalloway’s title?
Yes — Woolf considered organising the novel by the hour and called it The Hours throughout her drafts, before settling on Mrs Dalloway for publication in 1925.
What does the title mean?
It points to time as the medium of life and death. Big Ben tolls the hours through Mrs Dalloway’s single day; the film gives three women one day each. The title insists every ordinary hour carries the weight of a whole life.
Why did Cunningham use the discarded title?
As deliberate homage. Reclaiming the name Woolf set aside signals that his novel is a continuation of her work — making the textual conversation explicit from the cover in.
Did The Hours win awards?
Cunningham’s novel won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize. The 2002 film earned nine Oscar nominations; Nicole Kidman won Best Actress as Woolf.
Sources & notes
- British Library — Woolf’s working draft of Mrs Dalloway, “originally titled ‘The Hours’,” written across three notebooks in 1923.
- Woolf’s diary / Mark Hussey, Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel — the August 1922 “At Home: or The Party” jotting and the November 1922 decision to call it The Hours.
- Michael Cunningham, introduction to The Hours / Mrs. Dalloway (2022) — his first encounter with Woolf’s novel; The Hours won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize.
- Wikipedia & Britannica, “The Hours (film)” — Stephen Daldry (2002), nine Academy Award nominations, Best Actress for Nicole Kidman.
Independent study resource. Analysis is original; not affiliated with, endorsed by, or produced for NESA. “HSC” is a trademark of NESA. No copyrighted text from The Hours is reproduced here.
Related
Woolf wrote a title, then crossed it out. Seventy-three years later someone read her crossed-out word and built a Pulitzer novel and an Oscar-winning film on it. That is what a great book does: even the parts it discards keep working.