THE COMMON READER is a collection of essays. It was written by Virginia Woolf in 1925.

The extract which I’m going to analyze  denounces the  vagueness of literary criticism. Virginia Woolf’s opinion is that traditional fiction misses to express real life.

Criticism of novels is vague because novels don’t express what real life is truly like. Life is many things and we can call it  spirit, truth or reality. In any case it has moved off because the sense of life can be not expressed  with different tools than that of the traditional form.

Novels can no longer be written using the traditional structural principle because they  are not suitable to communicate the sense of life which readers are looking for. In addition traditional novels are no longer able to communicate the sense of life as it is. They are unable to  build a  "vision" in the mind of the reader .

This "vision" does not correspond to reality. Life is something that changes according to the people, there are different points of view (there is no longer a center and a single vision). Virginia Woolf wants a novel that does not dress, from top to bottom, the same buttons of all the others novels. She wants a book that evaluates the meaning of life and not to follow conventions without creating something new.

The writer could be able to suspend credibility for a moment: this takes the reader to link literature to life.

Virginia Woolf describes life as “a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end” so it is deeply different from the way in which it is described in novels. With the expression “the life of Monday or Tuesday” she means the important moments of life that came out of the various situations and impressions of ordinary actions of one day or another..

Readers want to read a noveldescribing true life without being influenced by the “tyrant”.of traditional conventions.

 The writer has to write what he/she chooses and the new novel should be rooted in the feelings of characters and  not on conventions; without caring if his/her novels are written in an accepted style.