> "Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. The old novelists, even the great, were uninterested in this halo, this semi-transparent envelope. They took life as it was given to them, as they found it; they did not find it necessary to make it different. They found it already arranged, as it were, in neat compartments; they found it, too, in the midst of a society which had almost reached the stage of scientific development: a society in which the human being was the centre, and the universe was composed of laws which could be observed, comprehended, and controlled."
The passage suggests that the old novelists (those writing before around 1910) were limited in their scope by a traditional way of thinking about the world. They saw the universe as orderly and predictable, and they reflected this in their writing. Woolf believed that something fundamental had shifted in the 20th century, and that this shift was reflected in the need for new ways of writing.
The "halo" she describes is a metaphor for the interiority of human experience, which is more fluid and less easily categorized than the external world. She argues that modern writers need to embrace this inner world and explore its complexity, rather than simply mirroring the outer world.
This quote is often seen as a statement of the changing nature of art and literature in the early 20th century, marked by Modernism and the rise of psychoanalysis, which emphasized the importance of the unconscious mind.