TIME IS ticking by, the minutes and the hours slowly bringing inescapable change into the lives of three very different women. They are separated from each other by time and place but a mysterious thread links their lives and pulls one towards the other. Their lives are interwoven, but they do not know it.
Each one is facing a crisis. Even though they are living in different cities at different times, their lives echo and copy each other's. One woman is a writer, the second a housewife and the third a bookish socialite who is planning a party. Here are three women who have lost their way in the world and are each facing breakdown.
It is 1923. The English novelist Virginia Woolf is living in the London suburbs. She is overcome by the boredom of suburban life and her creative force is fading. Woolf is fighting to finish her novel Mrs Dalloway, and the struggle is weighing her down. She is suffering from writer's block and knows that only the energy of the city will free her. Away from central London, Woolf is being forced into a lifestyle she does not want to lead, but it is for a reason. Woolf is hovering on the edge of mental illness and her doctors have told her she will go mad if she does not get out of London.
She struggles to write Mrs Dalloway, but the effort is slowly destroying her.
Now switch to a neatly antiseptic Los Angeles home in 1951. A bored housewife is reading Mrs Dalloway. Everything is neatly in place in Laura Brown's life. Everything is as it should be. Her only priority for the day is to bake a cake for her husband's birthday. She assembles the ingredients, but her movements are mechanical and there is a look in her eyes that should not be there.
Laura Brown, like Virginia Woolf, is trapped in a life she does not want to lead. Baking a cake should not be the nerve-racking challenge that faces Laura as she stands in her neatly-scrubbed kitchen. She looks round for escape, but it eludes her. She picks up Mrs Dalloway and momentarily forgets her own unhappiness as she reads about another woman's life.