- The Hours opens with a blast from the past, starting us off with a prologue that's set in the English countryside, near Sussex, in 1941.
- Virginia Woolf—though we don't yet know that it's her—leaves her house and "walks purposefully toward the river, certain of what she'll do" (Prologue.1).
- At the bank of the river, Virginia finds a large stone that's "roughly the size and shape of a pig's skull" (Prologue.1). She puts it into her pocket, then begins to walk forward into the water.
- When she's up to her waist in the water, Virginia pauses to take in her "last moment of perception" (Prologue.1). Then, "[a]lmost involuntarily (it feels involuntary, to her) she steps or stumbles forward and the stone pulls her in" (Prologue.1).
- Later, at home, Virginia's husband Leonard heads back inside after doing some work in the garden.
- In the sitting room, Leonard finds a blue envelope with his name on it. When he opens it, he finds a letter from Virginia, bidding him goodbye.
- Leonard rushes out to look for Virginia, but he doesn't find her.
- As the prologue draws to a close, Virginia's body floats down the river. Eventually, the current brings her up against the underwater pillars of a bridge.
- As Virginia's body lies dead under the water, life goes on in the world above her. A young boy and his mother walk along the bridge, and a military truck full of British soldiers drives across.
- From underneath the water, the novel's narrator tells us, Virginia's body "absorbs it all" (Prologue.7).