The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf, 1925

EXERCISES

-        What is missing in conventional novels?

In conventional novels there is a lack of likeness to life. Writers try to render their works similar to reality, but they fail as life cannot be reproduced the way they do; it is not plain like the vision they have in their mind.

-        How does Virginia Woolf describes life?

Virginia Woolf describes life as an ensemble of different impressions "trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel", an "incessant shower of innumerable atoms" that everyday shape themselves in a different way, and each day the moment of importance shifts, "the accent falls differently from of old". "Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end".

-        What does Woolf mean by "the life of Monday or Tuesday"?

Virginia Woolf means by the expression "the life of Monday or Tuesday" that the various situations and impressions everyone experiences on a day of his/her life, make such day different, recognizable and distinguished from the others.

-        What is the task of the novelist and how should fiction be written?

The novelist should convey the varying, the unknown and uncircumscribed spirit of life, whatever aberration or complexity it may display and without any influence from the external. He/she should base his/her work on his/her own feeling, and not on convention, without caring if his/her novel is written in the accepted style.

-        Can you see any similarity between Woolf's idea about fiction and Monet's Impressionist painting?

Yes, both are based on the idea that life is not an accepted and stable set of conventions, it is made of impressions and feelings. This is the way people should represent it, both writers and artists (this is one of the most important feature of Impressionism, the representation of reality not as it actually is, but only as our impression about it is).