I know I said I’d give this a rest, but Nico posted a link that was just too amusing to pass up. It turns out that Trinidadian writer VS Naipaul, considered by many to be the greatest living prose writer in English, has a rather dim view of female authors.
Some choice quotes:
The Trinidad-born writer said: “Women writers are different, they are quite different.
“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.” Asked to elaborate, he said this was due to their “sentimentality, the narrow view of the world”.
He added: “And 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. I don’t mean this in any unkind way.”
One has to admire the man for speaking his mind in the current political climate, but perhaps as he nears 80 he simply doesn’t care, and may even enjoy creating a stir.
In any event, being denounced as a misogynist and sexist has done little to tarnish the image of other literary giants from the past. If Naipaul finds himself in the same company as other notorious sexists like Shakespeare, Hemingway, Orwell, Virgil, Horace, Spinoza, Rousseau, Voltaire, etc… Well, it just doesn’t seem his “offensive” opinions will matter much in the long run.
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