The presente extract is taken from Virgina Woolf's The Common Reader, which is a collection of essays. Ist topic is telling the ordinary reader the way novelists should written a fiction. Throught her reflections Miss Woolf wants to criticize traditional form of writing.

 

She arranges her argumentation into two paragraphs.

 

In the first one the writer starts showing the vagueness of literature's criticism. According to Virgina, previous novels miss what people are looking for, that is life. Ideed traditional fictions are no longer suitable to convey the sence of the true life because living has changed in time. Neverthless writers keep on basing their works upon convention like a powerfull and unsrupulous tyrant controlls them. It follows that novelists create neither what they want nor what they chose but only what standards impose.

 

In the second section Virginia Woolf explains life is very far from being like this. In order to define what life is like and not what sense of life is (everyone has to find out his/her own sense), Miss Woolf examins the working of an ordinary mind in an ordinary day. The human mind receives a lot of impression which could be trivial, fantastic, evanescent or "engraved with the sharpness of steel". Anyhow they come from all sides as a shower of atoms and as their arrive, human mind decides which of them are important and which are not. In this way if the writer weren't a slave of the convention but a free man, if he built his work on his feeling, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy but only a luminous halo.

 

In the extract Virginia Woolf adopts a poethic language and ist rethorical and phonological images:

 

-metaphor: "some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant who has him in thrall"(à writers are slaves of traditional standars), "dressed down to the last button of their coats in the fashion of the hour"(àif writer had to write something that probably could happen, the same writer couldn't imagine anymore), "perhaps not a single button swen on as th Bond Street tailors would have it"(ànovelists are free writers only if they follow their impression

 

-anaphora: "no plot, no..., no..."(à in this way concepts rest in reader's mind)