"The Common Reader" - Virginia Woolf analysis

Pages 531-532

The present extract is taken from "The Common Reader", a collection of critical essays written in 1925 by Virginia Woolf. The topic of the extract is the way novelist should write a novel, the way fiction should be written.

Virginia Woolf's opinion is that traditional fiction misses to really convey  what life is really like.

The first of V. Woolf's statement concerns  the vagueness of literary criticism: the traditional novelist is not able to communicate the real sense of life to the reader.

According to Virginia Woolf truth and reality cannot be contained within strict rules. In spite of the efforts to construct a novel, the traditional novelist is not able to communicate his own vision  of the world. Virginia Woolf thinks  he misplaces his labour. He is somehow forced by an unscrupulous tyrant who constrains him to write a novel which is not real and far from readers' imagination because of the standerds he is asked to follow. 

Virginia Woolf wonders whether novels should be still written in the traditional way and she concludes that life is different and therefore asks novelists for something different. 

Virginia Woolf goes on examining the myriad impressions an ordinary mind receives on an ordinary day and, in her opinion, such impressions could not be analyzed in a traditional novel using the traditional  style.

She states that life is not symmetrically arranged and the task of the novelist should be to report the unknown and the uncircumscribed spirit of life without external conditionings.