There is a tiny pause, right at the start of the film The Hours that caught at my heart, but I didn’t think anyone else would notice it. It took me back to the work I did on my biography of Virginia Woolf. There were two documents in her archives that I found particularly distressing. One was the little soft-covered notebook she used for her diary for 1941. I knew there wouldn’t be any entries after March 28, the day she killed herself, but I couldn’t help turning the blank pages that followed, unable to believe that the voice I had been living with for the past five years had stopped speaking. The other was her suicide note. (One of the suicide notes, in fact. She wrote three — two versions for her husband, Leonard, and one for her sister Vanessa Bell — unable to stop revising her work until the end.) What struck me about those heart-breaking words (”I feel certain that I am going mad again: I feel we can’t go through another of these terrible times … You have given me the greatest possible happiness …”) was that she had written them in short, jagged half-lines, as if she could hardly get to the end of the sentences. I reproduced the letter in my book as it looked on her page, almost like a poem. Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours, part of which tells the story of Woolf’s last day, and which made use (among many other sources) of my biography (generously acknowledged), reprinted Woolf’s last letter in the same way. At the start of the film, Nicole Kidman speaks the words of the suicide note as we see her writing it. And she hesitates, almost imperceptibly, on those line breaks, as if she can’t quite go on. I was moved to hear it.The process of creative translation that stretches from Woolf writing that letter over 60 years ago to Kidman playing her character with Oscar-winning, long-nosed intensity and passion, is a complex one. It runs from Woolf’s life-story and her 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway, to Cunningham’s novel (the surprise American literary hit of 1999), to David Hare’s script and, now, to Stephen Daldry’s direction. I think Woolf would have been intrigued by this process. She was interested in the cinema as a new medium that could express emotions, like fear, without words (she wrote a piece on this in 1927 after going to see The Cabinet of Dr Caligari). Although she never visited the United States, she was fascinated by it (she once wrote a surreal fantasy called America Which I Have Never Seen), and would probably have gone there after the war if she had lived. It was a brilliant stroke of Cunningham’s to move the story of Mrs Dalloway from London to New York, with all the excitement of city life (in Woolf’s words, ”the bellow and the uproar … the triumph and the jingle … life; London; this moment of June”) transferred to the streets of Manhattan (in Cunningham’s words, ”the roil and shock of it”, its ”racket” and ”intricacy”).Mrs Dalloway is a book in love with a city, and it was written at the time the Woolfs moved from Richmond (the quiet suburb where they had been living because of Virginia’s breakdown and illness) to Bloomsbury. One of the big scenes in the film is a row between Virginia and Leonard (finely played with a nervy, clever, brusque tenderness by Stephen Dillane) about moving back into London. London means life; the suburbs are a living death.As Cunningham’s novel and Daldry’s film begins, Clarissa (just as in Woolf’s novel) is setting out ”to buy the flowers herself” for her party. This New York Clarissa Dalloway is Clarissa Vaughan, a beautiful woman in her mid-50s, played in the film with brittle, anxious glamour by Meryl Streep, who is going to give a party to celebrate a book prize that has been awarded to her friend and one-time lover, Richard Brown, a writer terminally ill with Aids. The characters in Mrs Dalloway recur in slightly altered forms in The Hours. Clarissa lives with a woman called Sally (after Woolf’s Sally Seton), has a daughter called Elizabeth and is visited during the day by Richard’s ex-lover, as Clarissa in the novel is visited by Peter Walsh. Richard’s novel is about a woman who kills herself.There are two other stories in The Hours. One is the story of a suburban American housewife, Laura Brown, pregnant with her second child, polite but distant with her husband, who is bringing up her son in the suburbs of Los Angeles in 1949 (like Mrs Dalloway, this is a post-war story) and who is fighting against a suicidal sense of unreality and worthlessness. In the film and in the novel, her intense relationship with her overdependant little boy is touchingly done. Mrs Brown (it is the name Woolf gives, in one of her essays, to the ”ordinary woman” she thinks novelists should be able to write about) is battling with her longing for death — and reading Mrs Dalloway. The fragile life of Mrs Brown, trying to be a normal wife and mother, is, I think, the most touching section of the book. We are left wondering, right to the end of the book and the film, whether, like the woman in her son’s novel, she kills herself.The third story is that of Woolf. Cunningham frames the novel with the day of her suicide, but concentrates on a day in 1923, when she is living with her husband in Richmond, longing for London, arguing with her servants, having Vanessa and her children to tea — and starting to write Mrs Dalloway. When that novel began life as The Hours, Woolf thought that her middle-aged society hostess, in love with life but haunted by the losses and failures of her past, and by ”the world’s experience” in the war, might end up killing herself. By the time she finished writing, it was Clarissa’s alter ego, the shell-shocked clerk and alienated visionary Septimus Smith, who chooses to commit suicide.Cunningham’s novel is a bold invention, in which Woolf’s presence and writing haunts all three of the intertwined stories. He has a strong idea of what made Woolf’s life heroic, her dedication to her work in the teeth of illness, and her violent swings between moods of pleasure, relish and excitement in life, and abysses of depression and despair. The same kinds of questions run through all three stories. What value has ”a life of ordinary pleasures”? Can a few outstanding moments provide consolation against the long beat of ”the hours”? Do writing — and reading — make life bearable? My reservations about the novel came from a biographer’s reluctance to pursue a real person into fiction’s territory of made-up thoughts and speeches. I found it hard to accept a Virginia Woolf who thinks to herself: ”She would like to write all day … but she worries that if she pushes beyond her limits she will taint the whole enterprise”; or who says to her husband: ”If you send Nelly in to interrupt me I won’t be responsible for my actions.” In these invented scenes and conversations, the class details do not always ring true. I can’t hear Woolf wanting to rush and ”fix her hair”, or Vanessa Bell commenting on ”a lovely coat for Angelica at Harrods”. (Angelica would be much more likely to wear a cut-down jacket of Duncan Grant’s, or a velvet cloak made out of old curtains.) In the Hare/Daldry film, such social details are even more of an irritant. Everything about the Woolf scenes is too grand: the rooms are too big and well-furnished, the servants are too smartly turned out (though their ongoing battle with their difficult mistress is well done) and Vanessa, in a fine, spiteful performance by Miranda Richardson, is absurdly posh, a high-society lady one couldn’t possibly imagine picking up a paintbrush. And, even with the now-famous nose and a perpetual scowl (this is a Woolf strong on ferocity but lacking in charm), Kidman looks much too young for the 59-year-old of the ”last day”. The death scene is grotesquely prettified. Woolf drowned herself on a cold day in March in a dangerous, ugly river that runs so fast, nothing grows on the bare banks. She was wearing an old fur coat, wellington boots and a hat. Whether she jumped or walked, dropped under or struggled, we don’t know. Kidman, bare-headed and dressed in a fetching tweed coat, walks gently and calmly into a beautiful, still, dappled stream, sun pouring through the leaves of trees in high summer and Philip Glass’s relentlessly tear-jerking music pounding away, as it does throughout. (It is a great relief when, in the New York scenes, we get a few minutes of Strauss’s Four Last Songs.) Hare’s script is more polemical than Cunningham’s novel. He makes much more of Woolf’s rage with her doctors and of the right to choose one’s sexuality. The three kisses between women — Virginia and Vanessa, Laura Brown and her sick neighbour, Clarissa and her partner — seem more meaningful here than they do in in the novel, which treats bisexuality as the normal condition of life. Everything is emphatic here. Leonard and Virginia hurl personal testimonies at each other in Richmond station: ”Only I can understand my own condition” … ”It was done out of love.” In all three stories there are an awful lot of long, emotional looks, tear-filled eyes, forgiving hugs and expressions of love. (It is refreshing to have a caustic cameo performance in the New York flower shop from Eileen Atkins, who usually gets to play Woolf.) This sentimental expressiveness is in strong contrast to Woolf’s own fiction, where one of the most striking and alarming qualities is its inhibition. Hardly anybody in her novels succeeds in communicating their feelings, making love or saying what they think.Where novel and film come together in an impressive tribute to Woolf, however, is in their eloquence about a subject which, so many years after Mrs Dalloway and the death of its author, is still a highly problematic one. Can we choose whether to live or die? ”It is possible to die … She — or anyone — could make a choice like that. It is a reckless, vertiginous thought,” thinks Laura Brown. In all three stories, a decision is being made about suicide. We see Woolf working out that, in her novel, ”Sane Clarissa will go on, loving London, loving her life of ordinary pleasures, and someone else, a deranged poet, a visionary, will be the one to die.” Why must someone die in the novel, Leonard asks her? ”Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more,” she replies.Laura puts the ”vertiginous thought” behind her and goes home, this time, to her family. Richard Brown tells Clarissa that he has stayed alive for her, but now she must let him go. How should we treat death? Hare — perhaps too consolingly — imagines the voice of Woolf telling us, as she leaves us, that she has mastered this question, and understands what to do: ”To look life in the face and to know it for what it is; to love it for what it is, and then to put it away.” — Â