The extract is taken from a collection of essays titled The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf and published in 1925. The novelist discusses here why 20ieth century literature is different from the traditional one: it is a consequence of the new way to consider life in Modernism.
The thesis Virginia Woolf supports is that traditional novel does not allow to find out what people seek, that is the sense of life. So herself underlines people is looking for something sure in that period.
In the second paragraph the essayst writes that truth and the sense of the existance may not be found in traditional novel. She criticizes its structure writing that it is too long but it does not reveal anything about human mind. Moreover writers are convinced it is the right way to write and the only possible to tell everything about life. They are subjected by convention and tradition to write linear sequencing novels because they think real life is so. Nevertheless times goes on and doubts and fear replace everything. The uncertainty leads the essayst to wonder if traditional novels really show real life and if they actually reflect the doubts which are tormenting people in this period.
In this way the essayst introduces the third paragraph, where she analyzes what is real life that every men live. It is very different from the plot writers have built since that moment. Life is not only a series of actions, from birth to death and man's mind is more complex than they show. Mrs Woolf explains that man does not think in a linear order, but his mind is continuously hit by a lot of impressions. A real writer, who wants to communicate his feeling to the others, must understand this and he must show it to people, without fears and without following the conventions, revolutionizing everything: life is not something fixed and determined, but a "luminous halo" as Mrs Woolf writes.
She ends the essay underlining what is a novelist's task with a rethoric question: he has to communicate the existance of an inner reality which belongs to everyone and that characterizes everyone without expressing personal points of view about it. This is the only way to present the life of a character as it is real, allowing to the reader to know the character, find something of him in it and also to make him think about the sense of his life.
The language used in the essay is not very simple: there are many images and similarities (the novelist is not considered as a tailor; the life like a "luminous halo" and not like a series of carriage lamps) which are not typical of an essay, but they express very well Mrs Woolf opinion about the task of modern literature.