The movie is about three women living in different times. The first is bipolar novelist Virginia Woolf (Kidman) trying to write the novel "Mrs Dalloway" in Richmond, Surrey in 1923. The second is Laura Brown, a housewife in California in 1951 who is reading the novel. The third is Clarissa Vaughan, who lives in New York City in 2001 and tends to a gay poet named Richard. He often calls her "Mrs. D" or "Mrs. Dalloway" in reference to the novel. The movie moves from one character to another many times and each character is shown for a similar amount of time.