Virginia Woolf as a Character in Michael Cunningham's THE HOURS

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 3,0, University of Paderborn (Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Two Recent Re-Writes, language: English, abstract: In this term paper I will show how a real person - Virginia Woolf - is presented as a fictional character in Michael Cunningham's The Hours. The title he chose for his book is the working title of Virginia Woolf s novel Mrs Dalloway. Cunningham s composed his work is composed of three interlacing parts, entitled Mrs Woolf , Mrs Dalloway and Mrs Brown . This fact hints at the possibility of his wanting to point out some relations between the authoress and her fictive offspring. To get a most objective picture of how Virginia Woolf really was, I also used her diary edited by Anne Oliver Bell, and gave the information derived from there priority in completing this term paper. Furthermore, I will compare Michael Cunningham s version of Virginia Woolf with descriptions of her by people that were close to her: Virginia s husband Leonard Woolf and her nephew Quentin Bell. When comparing Cunningham s novel with Virginia Woolf s diary I found that there were so many interesting points I was reluctant to suppress that I decided to shorten my inquiries into the other two books in order not to go beyond a reasonable volume of this paper.