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 cunningham