characters in Virginia Woolfs Story Virginia Woolf - Celebrated English novelist.

Virginia is tormented by her headaches and voices in her head. The Hours focuses on a day in 1923 when she lived in a suburb of London. Though extremely intelligent and highly respected, she is overly protected by her family, because they fear for her sanity. She has begun writing Mrs. Dalloway, a book which she hopes will be her masterpiece. Read an in-depth analysis of Virginia Woolf. Leonard Woolf - Virginia Woolfs husband. Leonard is the editor and publisher of the Hogarth Press, and he believes Virginia to be the most important writer of her generation. Though occasionally testy and curmudgeonly, he never becomes angry with Virginia, though he worries about her constantly. He looks out for Virginias health when she becomes too distracted to do so herself. Nelly - The cook in the Woolf household. Nelly is relentlessly domestic and stands in contrast to Virginias distracted relationship with the house and its workings. Her practicality prevents her from understanding Virginias dedication to her writing. She resents Virginias lack of involvement in her own house. Vanessa Bell - Virginias sister, a respected painter. Vanessa has a raucous, colorful, cheerful life and is mother to three children. Though three years older than Virginia, she looks younger than her sister because she is healthy and better adjusted. The two sisters are extremely close, and Vanessa acts as one of Virginias caretakers. Julian - Vanessas oldest child. Julian is fifteen years old and very handsome. He is Vanessas favorite. Quentin - Vanessas middle child, age thirteen. Quentin is not as handsome as Julian but is kind, stalwart, and inherently good. Virginia feels an affinity for Quentin because of his intelligence and sense of irony. Angelica - Vanessas youngest child, age five. Angelica is nervous and distractible, and the classic youngest child whose whims are indulged by her older brothers. Ralph - One of Leonards assistants. Ralph is stout, earthly, and somewhat incompetent. Marjorie - Another of Leonards assistants. Marjorie has a grating voice and is willing to do the tasks nobody else wants to do, even though she doesnt do them very well. Characters in Clarissa Vaughns Story Clarissa Vaughn - A lesbian editor who resides in New York in the late twentieth century. Clarissa lives in a lovely apartment in the West Village neighborhood of New York with her lover, Sally, and Clarissas daughter, Julia. She is cheerfully domestic and usually takes comfort in her beautiful apartment and stable life. The illness of her friend Richard, however, has caused her to reevaluate her choices in life, precipitating a midlife crisis of sorts. Richard calls her Mrs. Dalloway. Read an in-depth analysis of Clarissa Vaughn. Richard Brown - Novelist and poet, a gay man dying from AIDS complications. Richard and Clarissa are best friends from college and former lovers. Before he became sick, Richard was argumentative, intelligent and stubborn. He took pleasure in day-to-day existence and worked this affection into his novels, which were experimental and only sporadically successful. Richard is the adult son of Laura Brown. Sally - Clarissas live-in lover of eighteen years. Sally produces an interview show on public television. She is kind, steady, smart, and as domestic as Clarissa. Louis - A friend from Richard and Clarissas youth. Richards ex-lover, Louis now teaches drama in San Francisco. When Louis was young, he was very good looking, but he has aged dramatically. He is sentimental and cries often. Louis feels jealous of Clarissa and Richards intimate relationship. He is fundamentally regretful about his life and believes that there is very little love in this world. Julia - Clarissas daughter, age nineteen. Julia is willfully boyish and independent. Though straight, her friendship with lesbian activist Mary Krull has caused her to shave her head and wear combat boots. She is not as close with her mother as Clarissa would like them to be. Julia deals with difficult social situations gracefully. Mary Krull - Friend of Julias, lesbian activist and radical feminist. Mary comes across as humorless and judgmental, and thinks that Clarissas domestic lesbianism is a futile attempt to be normal in a homophobic world. She is desperately in love with Julia. Walter Hardy - A friend of Clarissa and Richards. Walter has managed to avoid contracting HIV even though his lover has the virus. Though Walter means well, Richard resents that he has stayed healthy when so many of their friends are sick. Evan - Walters boyfriend. Evan has HIV but has responded well to the drugs he takes. Olivier St. Ives - Movie star and friend of Sallys. Oliver was an established action star before he came out of the closet in the magazine Vanity Fair. He wants to produce a thriller with a gay protagonist and tries to get Walter Hardy to write the script.

Laura Brown - A housewife who lives in Los Angeles in 1949. Laura is a young wife and mother of a three-year-old son. She lives in an attractive house and has a nice husband but constantly feels that she should have a different life. A bookworm, she sees herself an outsider who lives in exile from a life of domestic normalcy. Read an in-depth analysis of Laura Brown.

Richie - Lauras three-year-old son. Richie will grow up to be Richard Brown, the novelist and friend of Clarissa Vaughn. Richie loves his mother completely and wants to be with her all the time, and he closely observes everything she does. He is extremely sensitive and prone to becoming upset. Dan Brown - Lauras husband. Dan was a war hero and much more popular than Laura in high school. When he returned from the war, he fell in love with Laura and married her. Dan is consistently kind and appreciative of Laura. He feels content with his life and has high hopes for the future. Kitty - Lauras next-door neighbor. Kitty is very self-assured and has a kind of confident magnetism. Though Laura idealizes Kitty, she has been unable to have children and has to go into the hospital for tests that may not bode well for her future. Ray - Kittys husband. Ray has an unremarkable job and is mildly incompetent. Analysis of Major Characters Virginia Woolf The character Virginia Woolf is closely based on the biography of the actual Virginia Woolf, a celebrated writer who lived at the beginning of the twentieth century. Virginia Woolf is best known for perfecting a stream-of-consciousness style, which imitates on the page the free, impressionistic flow of human thought. Virginia Woolfs struggle with mental illness led her to commit suicide, which Cunningham depicts in the novels prologue. The rest of the novel is filled with a sense of foreboding, because every scene is colored by the knowledge that she will ultimately decide to take her own life. Virginia struggles with her mental health and is very conscious of this struggle. She fights to keep the shadow in the mirror, the pounding headaches, and the voices in her head at bay. Virginia focuses on her writing as a way of channeling her energy and emotion productively. At the same time, Virginia sees her writing as something that happens to her rather than as something she has fully under her control. She is incredibly sensitive to the world around her and unusually receptive to small details of her environment, which she believes have incredible significance. Her sensitivity makes her a great writer, but she also is subject to incredibly strong emotions that are set off by events that other people might not even notice. Though she wants to be healthy, she perceives the world in such a profound way that the feelings of madness haunt her. Clarissa Vaughn Clarissas character is closely based on the title character of Virginia Woolfs novel Mrs. Dalloway. Like the character in Woolfs book, she has a wondrous outlook toward the world around her. Though she takes great pleasure in the day-to-day details of life, she questions the choices that she has made and has doubts about what her life has come to. She has strong feelings of nostalgia for her love affair with Richard and the sense of unchecked possibility that she had in her youth. Clarissa compares this period of wild, unabashed freedom to the domesticity of her present life. She loves the small domestic details of her life, and she enjoys the simple acts of buying flowers and keeping a beautiful apartment. At the same time, she wonders if all of it is enough and has doubts about whether she feels fulfilled by her life and her relationship with Sally. Even though she questions some of her choices, at the end of the day she takes comfort in the idea that the life has meaning because of those hours that are filled with supreme, wonderful pleasure. Laura Brown Laura Brown, like many women of her generation, married young and has settled into the roles of wife and mother at a relatively young age. Laura feels surprised by the direction her life has taken. In high school, her husband, Dan, was popular while she was a shy bookworm. Dan became a war hero, and when he returned to California he married Laura and they had a child. Laura feels as though she has woken up in someone elses life, and her role as a housewife suffocates her. She thinks that she should be happy, because her husband is kind, her son loves her, and they live in a nice home. Laura feels that something is wrong with her but tries to convince herself that she is normal. She seeks comfort in books, specifically Virginia Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway. Through reading, she can step out of her life and critically examine her own experiences. The subject matter of suicide also forces her to consider the idea that she wants to find a way out of her own life. In the final chapter of The Hours, we find out that Laura attempted suicide and ultimately left her family to move to Canada. The day described in The Hours shows Laura considering these two possibilities, possibly providing the catalyst for making the decision to leave her family. http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/hours/canalysis.html#Laura-Brown