“Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo . . .”

Virginia Woolf argues that life is not comprised of an orderly series of events, but rather, life is complex and spiritual in nature. Therefore, when writing about life, novelists should “. . . convey this varying, unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display . . .” In its 1925 review of this collection of essays, the New York Times notes the high level of creativity in Woolf’s analysis. She is an “uncommon reader” because her ideas are innovative and because she is also a novelist whose work redefines what novels should be about: not orderly lamps, but the mysteries of the human spirit.

Woolf, Virginia. The Common Reader: First Series, edited by Andrew McNeillie, Harcourt, 1984, p. 150.

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