The Hours is the story of three young women searching for more potent, meaningful lives. Each exists at a different time and place; all are linked by their yearnings and their fears. Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman), in a suburb of London in the early 1920s, is battling insanity as she begins to write her first great novel, Mrs. Dalloway. Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), in Los Angeles at the end of World War II, is reading Mrs. Dalloway, and finding it so revelatory she begins to consider making a devastating change in her life as a wife and mother. Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep), in New York City today is a contemporary version of Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway, and is in love with her friend Richard (Ed Harris), a brilliant poet dying of AIDS. Their stories intertwine and ultimately come together in a surprising, transcendent moment of shared recognition.