The Hours Characters

At fifty-two years old, Clarissa Vaughan is as youthful, energetic, and full of zest as she was when she was eighteen. In love with life and the world around her despite tragedies, troubles, and fl...

Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? Not Michael Cunningham, that's for sure.Virginia Woolf—the celebrated English modernist who is read and remembered today for her literary innovation, her insight,...

To all appearances, this late 1940s housewife seems like a poster child for all-American living. Laura Brown lives in a sunny and pristine suburb of Los Angeles with a war-hero husband, a three-yea...

Okay, folks, spoiler alert: the big twist in this novel comes when we find out that Laura Brown's three-year-old son Richie and Clarissa Vaughan's beloved friend Richard Worthington Brown are one a...

Sally is a "pale, gray-haired woman" who is "harsh-faced, impatient," and "ten pounds lighter than she ought to be" (8.1). She is also a "lovely" (8.1), "devoted, intelligent woman," "a producer of...

It stands to reason that Julia's full name is probably Julia Vaughan, but The Hours never makes this perfectly clear. Julia is Clarissa Vaughan's teenaged daughter, and at eighteen or nineteen year...

Louis Waters is one of Clarissa Vaughan's oldest friends. He's also the former lover and long-term partner of Richard Brown; the two of them were together from their late teens until almost the end...

Mary Krull is the radical queer theorist who, according to Clarissa Vaughan, has Clarissa's daughter, Julia, "in thrall" (1.31). If you ask us, though, we'd say it's the other way around: Mary is q...

Walter Hardy is a youngish, handsome, and fashionably athletic writer of popular romance novels, and he numbers among Clarissa Vaughan's many literary acquaintances. In fact, Clarissa likes him qui...

The novel's best and most revealing description of Leonard Woolf is also its first. As Virginia Woolf comes downstairs in the morning, she finds her husband looking over page proofs in the Hogarth...

Vanessa Bell was Virginia Woolf's real-life older sister, and she appears in a fictionalized form in The Hours. Intriguingly, rather than emphasize her historical talents as a painter, graphic arti...

Yeah, this is a novel that presents real-life authors as fictional characters. Nevertheless, no, this Dan Brown isn't that Dan Brown.In The Hours, Dan Brown is the nice young man who "kissed, court...

It's hard not to like Kitty, even if she is a bit of a meanie.As Laura Brown knows perfectly well, she and Kitty never would have been friends if they had gone to high school together (9.28). Where...

BarbaraBarbara manages the flower shop where Clarissa Vaughan buys flowers for her party. She is "forty or so, a pale, ample woman who came to New York to sing opera. Something about her face—the...

Julian, Quentin, and AngelicaJulian, Quentin, and Angelica are the children of Virginia Woolf's sister, Vanessa Bell. On the day that they come to visit their aunt, Julian is fifteen years old, Que...

Mrs. LatchMrs. Latch is one of Laura Brown's neighbors, and she watches Laura's three-year-old son, Richie, during the hours when Laura makes the spontaneous decision to sit alone in a hotel room r...