VIRGINIA WOOLF

THE COMMON READER, 1925

•1.       What is missing in conventional novels? In conventional novels the writer seems constrained to provide a plot, a comedy, a love interest. In this kind of novels he or she cannot write what he or she chose. If a writer was a free man and not a slave, conventional novels could not miss the novelist's own feelings. To conclude life represents what in conventional novels is missing.

•2.       How does Virginia Woolf describe life? Life is far from being like the content of conventional novels, it is reach of feelings, full of myriads of impressions. Everyday life is what matter in order to Virginia Woolf. In her opinion 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.

•3.       What does Woolf mean by "the life of Monday or Tuesday"? Virginia Woolf means everyday life.

•4.       What is the task of the novelist and how should fiction be written? The task of the novelist consists on display complexity and aberration with a little mixture of the alien and external. He or she should express their own feelings.

•5.       Can you see any similarity between Woolf's ideas about fiction and Monet's Impressionist painting? Both do not respect the conventional rules of literature and paintings of that time. In the extract Virginia Woolf criticizes conventional novels. Impressionists do not follow all the ordinary rules of academic painting.