The novel's title alerts the reader to the passing of time in a single day and the way that Woolf used this to mimic consciousness itself. In Cunningham's novel, Woolf leaves her Richmond house with a sudden desire to take the train to London and lose herself, thinking of walking the streets 'as Big Ben strikes the hours, which fall in leaden circles over the partygoers and the omnibuses'. It was a shape that she learned from James Joyce, whose Ulysses she read in early drafts. The circadian structure came from her impulse to write a 'modern' kind of fiction, where an 'ordinary day' confined the novelist to the fluctuations of consciousness. 'Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day,' she had suggested in her essay 'Modern Fiction'.

It is a way into the ambition that later novelists have learned from Woolf. 'It is the close of an ordinary day.' But this last phrase is not so ordinary. In The Hours, Virginia Woolf stands at a parlour window 'watching the dark descend on Richmond'. The title signifies Cunningham's allegiance to Mrs Dalloway, but more than this. For many readers, they were familiar markers of the time of day. In 1924, the year before the novel was published, the chimes of Big Ben started being broadcast regularly on the radio. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.' These were not just London sounds. First a warning, musical then the hour, irrevocable. We hear Big Ben for the first time early in the novel: 'There! Out it boomed. The consciousnesses of different characters are united by shared sights and sounds, above all by the chimes of Big Ben, dividing up the span of the novel (which begins at 10 in the morning and ends that night, some time after midnight). She thought of calling it 'The Hours' because it is a circadian novel, its events taking place during a single day, and the times of day giving it its structure. It was Virginia Woolf's working title for the work that eventually became Mrs Dalloway. W e know that the title of Michael Cunningham's novel is important because it is itself a fragment of literary history.

The hours mrs dalloway