The Light Of The Lighthouse: Virginia Woolf's Feminist Thoughts

Based on her own life experience, creative practice and authoress's acute gender consciousness, Virginia Woolf made great efforts to probe the relation between women and literary creation, speculating plights of traditional women's culture and literature and pointing out the close ties between women's literature and their social life. Giving a positive appraisal to both the practice and theory of women's literature, she picked the history of women's literature and exploited the theme and form as well. She criticized traditional love pattern and approved of sisiterhood. Her creative view that "androgyny" was the best state for literary creation as well as a good way to dissolve differences between male and female provoked intense responses and longtime discussions among the literary world. Her avant-garde opinion of literary criticism not only had a directive impact on the women's literary creation at the time, but also indicated the trend of development of feminist literary criticism.This article tries to comb through the feminist thoughts embodied in Virginia Woolf's theses, diaries, letters, and novels and to conduct a relatively comprehensive analysis of her feminist literary criticism concepts as well as her influence on Western feminist theories of a later generation.