The extract is taken from Modern Fiction,an essay of the Common Reader, one of the most important essays written by Virginia Woolf in 1925. The text is about what a novelist should do to write freely, without following the traditional conventions of Virginia Woolf's time that didn't let the novelist to communicate the real sense of life. The novelist addresses her ideas to the common reader,in other words people who did not necessarily study literature. 

The text is arranged into two sequences: the first is about the restrictions of traditional novels: "to provide a plot,to provide comedy,tragedy,love interest etc...". Virginia Woolf's aim is to express a new way to write a novel, she outlines the crisis that traditional novel is undergoing: the old style is no more suitable for writing.

The novelist  compares the traditional novel's conventions like a tyrant that controlsthe writer and constrains him to follows the restrictions,in this way he can't give to the reader what he want: the sense of life.

In the second sequence Virginia Woolf expresses the concept of the sense of life as the modern man perceives it : feelings etc... .

The novel concludes  developing the relationship tipycal in Virginia Woolf's poetic language.