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.