The extract is taken from a collection of essays titled The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf and published in 1925. The novelist discusses here her convinctions about how a novel must be written, comparing the Modernist novel to the traditional one.
The essayst addresses to the "common readers" and she supports a thesis: her personal view of life and its sense.
The reader may found the thesis in the second sequence of the essay: Mrs Woolf thinks life is not a linear sequence of actions and thoughts, but a "luminous halo", not defined and sure.
In her thesis she criticizes also the view of life in 19th traditional novel. First of all the essayst writes traditional novel is not able to really convey how life is and how everyone considers it (like a spirit, like a truth). Traditional novelists follow a plot and a linear sequence of events and this is also the way they consider life. Convention and tradition force them to do this and they are scared by their own feelings. Mrs Woolf goes on writing time goes by and doubts emerge in writers' and people's mind and they cause a change.
The essayst denies traditional novelists view of life because it is not a series of linear actions and thoughts, but herself writes every person is hit by a lot of images and impressions during his life, which leads him to remember the past, thinking about the present and to forseeing the future; something is remembered and many other impressions are erased. In her opinion this is the reality and it is also what a good writer should give to the reader, overcoming conventions, refusing plots, comedies and tragedies.
Mrs Woolf ends her essay underlining novelist's task: to convey the sense of life (she defines a "spirit") to the reader.
The extract is composed of two sequences. In the first paragraph of the first, one essayst introduces the issue, writing that traditional novel does not help the reader to find out what he seeks, that is the sense of life.
Mrs Woolf analyzes in the second paragraph why it does not convey real life to the reader and she ends this part asking if life is really a linear sequence of actions.
In the second sequence she shows why life is not so and she gives her opinion about what life is.
The language the essayst uses is quiet simple bacause of how she builds sentences. Anywhere, using many similarities and metaphors, she helps the reader to better understand her point of view.
So the essay is overall clear and the writer expresses supports her opinion in a effectively way.