Broken driftwood pieces and a feather on a blue shoreline beside a small dark wave.

Original artwork, not a still

A Room of One's Own (1929)

Virginia Woolf

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Behind the line

What it means

Our interpretation.

Literature is pictured as a landscape scattered with human wreckage, where caring excessively about other people's opinions has done lasting damage. The force of 'beyond reason' matters: the warning concerns dependence on approval that grows so strong it becomes destructive.

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