The plot focuses on three women of different generations whose lives are interconnected by the 1925 novel "Mrs Dalloway" by Virginia Woolf. These are Clarissa Vaughan (Streep), a New Yorker preparing an award party for her AIDS-stricken long-time friend and poet, Richard (Harris) in 2001, Laura Brown (Moore), a pregnant 1950s California housewife in an unhappy marriage with a young son, and Virginia Woolf (Kidman) herself in 1920s England, who is struggling with depression and mental illness while trying to write her novel.