Virginia Woolf (Kidman), in a suburb of London in the early 1920s, is battling insanity as she begins to write her first great novel, Mrs. Dalloway. A wife and mother in post-World War II Los Angeles, Laura Brown (Moore), is reading Mrs. Dalloway and finding it so revelatory that she begins to consider making a devastating change in her life. Clarissa Vaughan (Streep), a present-day version of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, lives in New York city and is in love with a friend, who is dying of AIDS.