Like the best modernist novels, The Hours on the surface is a simple slice of life, detailing the events that occur on one day in the lives of three women in their three respective time periods. James Joyce used the technique of compacting time as a literary device to great effect in Ulysses, following his two protagonists through the streets of Dublin on one typical, but memorable, June day. In a similar way, Woolf placed Clarissa Dalloway's life under a microscope--for just one day--in Mrs. Dalloway. Countless other 20th-century literary greats have employed this same technique in their works, and by focusing the time frame so narrowly, these authors could dig more deeply into seemingly ordinary moments--enabling them to excavate a character's lifetime in the space of a few hours. Their modernist undertaking comes to cinematic fruition in The Hours, the story of what happens to three women on a single day in an elegant exploration of families, artists, lovers and sisters. In 2001, Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep) is a conflicted book editor and a lesbian who, like her namesake Clarissa Dalloway, is planning a bittersweet party for a former love. In the 1950s, Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) is a housewife and mother who's reading Mrs. Dalloway and struggling, much like Woolf or Sylvia Plath, to find her identity and voice in a culture that says that, as a woman, she shouldn't have one. In the 1920s, Woolf (Nicole Kidman) is living in the English countryside with her husband Leonard, writing Mrs. Dalloway, occasionally sinking into madness and always restlessly pining for the intellectual stimulation of London. Adhering the three narratives is Richard Brown (Ed Harris): The talented, dying, misunderstood novelist in whose honor Clarissa is throwing her party. Harris' role threads its way through the '50s segment as well, and he serves as the modern-day heir to Woolf's literary legacy.