The extract is taken from The Common Reader, a collection of essays written by Virginia Woolf. It deals with the vagueness which afflicts literary criticism and the way the novel should be like.

The  first part introduces the writer's opinion about the fragility of nineteenth-century novels. They don't communicate what life is really like so they are not suitable for readers because the reality they present is not true but only a form of fiction.

The writer seems constrained not by his own free will but by some tyrant who controls him and provides a plot, comedy, tragedy and love interests. The tyrant is of course a reference to the traditional conventions followed when writing fiction.

In the second paragraph Virginia Woolf presents her own point of view about life. Life is a sum of a myriad of impressions that are ”trivial, fantastic, evanescent or engraved“ and ”an incessant shower of innumerable atoms“ that everyday seems to affetc (condition)  actions and ways of thinking. The novelist  introduces ”the life of Monday or Tuesday“ which represent the several circumstances and impressions which make a common day different from the others.

Life is not a series of gig  lamps symmetrically arranged but a luminous circle of light surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

Virginia Woolf thinks that a novelist should express  his or her characters'  feelings and not be controlled by tyrant conventions that limit s their narrative creativity.