How essential is the knowledge of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway to an understandable r

How essential is the knowledge of Woolf 's Mrs . Dalloway to understand The Hours by Michael Cunningham

Michael Cunningham 's The Hours is the complete reworking of Virginia Woolf 's novel Mrs . Dalloway . The book shifts in time , showing profound connections during one day in the lives of the three women in different time periods : writer Virginia Woolf creating her new novel Mrs . Dalloway and suffering from the mental disease at the same time reader Laura Brown ,a housewife and a mother in post-war California who suffers from her stifling marriage and

modern-day book editor , Clarissa Vaughn (nicknamed Mrs .Dalloway , preparing for a party she is throwing for her friend , a poet , who is in the last stages of AIDS

In his interview to Lycos , Michael Cunningham says that he tried to make his book entirely accessible to people who know nothing at all about Virginia Woolf and are not even entirely sure if she was a real person He also says the readers do not need to know anything about Woolf in order to be able to understand her compulsion to create something beautiful , which is one of the things that he thinks makes the human species most interesting and most worth preserving

However , not all readers would agree with Cunningham 's point of view . I have read The Hours without ever having read Woolf 's Mrs . Dalloway and had a great number of questions as to the characters . Moreover , it was difficult for me to follow the plot . After reading Woolf 's Mrs Dalloway I realized that almost everything is clear to me . However , I decided to read The Hours one more time in order to enjoy it fully this time . So I think it is impossible to understand and enjoy The Hours without ever having read Mrs . Dalloway and without having an idea of Virginia Woolf 's life and work

The thing is that Michael Cunningham borrows the names and key traits of the characters of Mrs . Dalloway and interweaves versions of the two plots of Woolf 's novel with imagined scenes of Woolf herself at work on the book

It is very important to understand that in The Hours we have the writer (Virginia Woolf , the reader (Laura Brown ) and the fictional character (Clarissa Vaughn

While creating a fictional character of Virginia Woolf , Cunningham cited a long list of sources for his imagining of the tormented author from biographies by her husband and nephew to her own diaries . The result may be fictional , but we are invited to believe that it is not that far from the truth . To have a better understanding of pains of creating of fictional Woolf the reader should at least be acquainted with the main facts of her biography such as mental illness

Regardless of its veracity , Cunningham 's portrait of Woolf is heartbreaking . He clearly believes that Clarissa Dalloway is in some ways a Woolf figure , and the structure of the novel reinforces this parallel . Beginning with a stunning account...