Sir Naipaul Got It Wrong — Women Can Write

Winning the Nobel Prize would be enough to go to anyone’s head, but VS Naipaul may possibly have an over-inflated sense of his own importance.

The author sparked controversy when he declared there was no female writer whom he considers his equal earlier this week.

“I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me.”

When asked why this was the case, he said it was due to women’s sentimentality and “narrow view of the world.”

Jane Austen (and her supposedly “sentimental ambitions”) even copped it.

The Trinidad-born writer seems to have some long-held, obsolete and patronizing views about women and their role in society.

“Inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too.”

“My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold it was all this feminine tosh.”

To give credit where credit is due, Naipaul did manage to add:

“I don’t mean this in any unkind way.”

Apologies VS, we must have misunderstood you when you publicly labeled women as narrow-minded, intellectually inferior, maudlin and feeble.

The author’s writings have been applauded but his world views are lacking.

Patrick French, Naipaul’s biographer, has described him as bigoted, arrogant, vicious, racist, a woman-beating misogynist and sado-masochist.

The names Dorothy Parker, Alice Walker, Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir obviously mean nothing to this man; a man whose comments reveal him to be not only misogynistic, old-fashioned and supremely arrogant, but also selectively unaware of some of the greatest writers in herstory.

Contact the author here: brianna@morningquickie.com