The extract is taken from Virginia Woolf's The Common Reader, one of the many critical essays she wrote. It consists of two sequences and it reveals Virginia Woolf's position against the conventional standards followed to write a novel.

The whole first sequence is aboutis organized into lots of chapters, it must have a considerable plot and it has to be as realistic as possible.  In order to make the reader better understand  that the writer seems constrained to create a novel which has to follow the previously quoted features, Virginia Woolf uses the reference to a  tyrant  using therefore a metaphor.

The sequence ends with two questions,  answers to which are given in the second one.

In the second sequence the writer wants the reader to think about life, or more precisely about the myriad impressions every day an ordinary mind receives and she wants the reader also to think about what she will call the "moments of being". All this is particularly important in V. Woolf's  opinion. It goes therefore without saying that a writer should write about such  impressions,  feelings and  memories.

Virginia Woolf had understood the relation existing between life and novels, so she perfectly understood that the conventional novel resulted unfulfilling for a Modern human being  because traditional novels did not succeed in reporting what  life was really like. Truly  they missed what people were looking for. And all that explains  why she adopted a new writing technique, able to report character's feelings, opinion and thoughts.