Romantic realism and sense of life
Rand's view of art as a concretisation of values, and of the emotional sum of a person's view of existence.
Rand described her own fiction as Romantic realism: characters as they could and ought to be, in a realistic world. A "sense of life", in her account, is the pre-conceptual, emotional sum of one's basic view of existence, which art expresses.
Read it in Rand’s words
The Romantic Manifesto