Modern fiction according to the Common Reader by Virginia Woolf

In the chapter titled Modern Fiction Virginia Woolf is saying that modern fiction is an improvement on the fiction written by authors like Fielding and Austen. She says that if we make a comparison between writing literature and manufacturing vehicles while there is a lot of improvement in the way vehicles are manufactured, in the art of manufacturing literature there is not a lot of improvement. Writers write a little bit differently and try something else that seems like a change but there is not a lot of improvement. At the juncture of history that Virginia Woolf wrote the writers look back at the writers who came before them and think that the writers who came before them have already accomplished what they ought to have accomplished, their achievements wear a serenity that cannot be compared with Virginia Woolf and her fellow writers because she thinks the battle was not as fierce for the writers who came before her as it was for her generation of writers. Virginia Woolf writes about materialists. Materialists are writers who spend immense skill and work writing about material things and make it look like the material things are enduring and eternal. Virginia Woolf talks about life, spirit, truth, reality concepts which she believes all fiction should or ought to deal with. Yet after reading most books we end up closing the books with a sigh of disappointment. Is this what it is all about? Is this what it should be about? The writer tries to create a piece of writing which does not resemble the vision in our minds for what a piece of writing ought to be. The writer appears to be writing not out of their own free will but seems to be held in thrall by someone who appears to demand of the writer an equation or a kind of plot which has a certain amount of comedy and a certain amount of tragedy, a romantic aspect and other things like in an equation. Woolf says that is not how it is in real life. Virginia Woolf says that real life is very different from the popular novels written about the nature of life at the time that it was written. Virginia Woolf is surveying a period of time after the time of Fielding and Austen. Virginia Woolf describes life as a semi transparent halo. Virginia Woolf says that the task of the novelist is to convey the uncircumscribed spirit of life. Compared to the writers who came before him James Joyce is a spiritual writer. This writer according to Virginia Woolf tries to convey the complexity of life. Here she talks about some limitation imposed by the method. The method is the idea that all novels should have so much comedy, so much tragedy, so much love interest, and so on. I think she is trying to say that in a bad novel we feel confined and shut in but in a good novel we feel enlarged and set free. This is something imposed by the method. The idea that all novels should have a certain amount of comedy, a certain amount of tragedy, love interest etc. What if it is not like that, seems to be the question. The real task of the novelist is to write about that quality which makes life life rather than follow a method of providing a certain percentage of comedy, a certain percentage of tragedy and a certain percentage of love interest. This is something I wrote earlier after reading The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf. Yesterday or day before yesterday I read something I wrote after reading the Common Reader. I am unable tp find that now. But when I searched for that I found these words I wrote after reading the chapter titled Modern Fiction in The Common Reader. The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf was recommended to me by my father. It is an awesome book!