It is always sad to see how a writer who has lost his creative powers is trying to revive interest towards himself through unintelligent and outrageous statements. V.S. Naipaul, a brilliant writer who is, sadly, long past his artistic prime, is attempting to attract people’s attention by making nasty statements about female writers:
This time around, his target is the woman writer, a species whose work and “narrow” concerns, he says, is “unequal to me.” During an interview at the Royal Geographic Society earlier this week, he singled out Jane Austen for a Naipaulian drubbing, claiming that he “couldn’t possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world.” He can read a paragraph of text and “know whether it is by a woman or not,” since “inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too.”
It makes me cringe in vicarious shame to see a talented author make such a fool of himself.
Thank you, KT, for sending me the link to this article.
Clarissa's Blog 
This reminds me of the people who for some reason, upon reading my work (without the name attached), believe I am a guy. Apparently (so it has been explained to me), I understand some sort of mindset that is absent in women, though I think it’s more along the lines of “you write more male characters than females, so you must be a guy”.
Or maybe they, like Naipaul, believe that women are inferior writers, and couldn’t believe that a woman could successfully write to their tastes. There’s probably a scripted response I should form in response to test which reason is more prevalent.
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I don’t know if you are a science-fiction fan (and if you are, and you know this, I don’t think Clarissa knows so I will say it anyway), but there was a science-fiction author who wrote a lot of really wonderful, award-winning short stories, called James Tiptree, Jr. This writer was really a woman, Alice Sheldon, writing under a pseudonym, and before that fact became widely known, male critics/reviewers/other writers/whatever would often assume she had to be male, not just because of the masculine name but also because she “wrote like a man.” Whatever that means.
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I didn’t know of that specific example, but there are lots of others. Female writers under male-sounding pseudonyms often never faced any inquiry as to whether they were, in fact, male or female.
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I mentioned this on another website, but if he thinks that Jane Austen is sentimental, and her books just about romance (which is what I take the “sentimental ambition” to be — the ambition to marry a handsome young aristocrat or gentleman farmer and live happily ever after), he has misread her. Her books, underneath their droll prose style and social-event-heavy plots, are about women trying to ensure their economic survival through marriage.
(Also: which of Naipaul’s books do you think are the best? I remember reading about him when he won the Nobel Prize, and thinking I should pick up one of his books — I did get one, though I don’t remember which it was, and couldn’t really get into it. But I’d like to try again at some point, since he’s got such a towering reputation.)
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A House for Mr. Biswas is a work of genius, in my opinion. It is set in Trinidad but it speaks to my post-colonial experience like no other book I ever read.
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I’ve never had much respect for Naipul after reading his essay on Eva Peron. I’m anything but a Peron sympathizer, but to call him a “dictator” is grossly inaccurate. His grasp of Argentina’s history and politics there is superficial at best.
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Actually, I’ve never read that one. Naipaul writes great novels but his non-fictional production is worse than mediocre, in my opinion.
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