In the next section 'It is a suburb of London. Yet the novel has two other narrative threads. 'Was it the Prince of Wales's, the Queen's, the Prime Minister's?' (The prime minister will later arrive as a guest at the party for which Clarissa Dalloway is preparing.) Cunningham's character is distracted from her purchase in a flower shop by a loud noise from the street, where filming is taking place, and the sudden appearance from a trailer of a well know profile '(Meryl Streep? Vanessa Redgrave?)'. In the back of the car passers-by glimpse 'a face of the greatest importance'. Woolf's protagonist is at the florist's when she is startled by a car backfiring ('oh! A pistol shot in the street outside!'). There are little jokes for the reader who knows the original. In The Hours, Clarissa is spotted at the corner of Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue by Willie Bass, who more bluntly considers her 'certain sexiness' ('She must have been spectacular twenty-five years ago') and then, as the light changes, walks on, unnoticed by her. ('a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty'). Woolf's protagonist passes a man called Scrope Purvis, and we suddenly catch his thoughts, as if they were some briefly audible skein of sound. We follow Clarissa Vaughan, walking through the streets of New York, as Woolf's narrative followed Clarissa Dalloway. And anyway, she is no tragic protagonist, but a woman, like Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway, 'destined to charm, to prosper'. Her 'existing first name', he suggests, is 'a sign too obvious to ignore'.

Her friend Richard has even dubbed her 'Mrs Dalloway', scorning her own itch to be likened to a heroine from Tolstoy or Henry James. Has Cunningham's character not noticed, you feel like asking, that she is acting out the opening of a famous novel? She certainly knows Woolf's fiction. Woolf's novel begins with a woman called Clarissa Dalloway leaving her London house on a June morning to buy flowers for a party. The prologue is followed by a second section, titled 'Mrs Dalloway', in which a 52-year-old woman called Clarissa Vaughan goes shopping for flowers in New York on a June morning at 'the end of the twentieth century'.

But this is not a fictionalisation of her life and death it is an imitation – a reworking – of her novel, Mrs Dalloway. In the prologue of The Hours we are asked to imagine, as if from her point of view, the day of Virginia Woolf's suicide. It is the first sign of his activity of imitation. This work in progress still has her provisional title, 'The Hours', which Cunningham has duly taken for his own book. M ichael Cunningham's novel has an epigraph from Virginia Woolf's diary entry for 30 August 1923, when she was at work on her fourth novel, Mrs Dalloway.

The hours by michael cunningham