Indian-origin Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul, who barely days ago ended a feud with former friend Paul Theroux, courted controversy again as he dismissed women writers and said that he considers no woman writer his equal.
In a conversation on his literary career at the Royal Geographical Society in London, Sir Vidia described women writers as “different”.
“Women writers are different, they are quite different,” he told Evening Standard editor Geordie Greig, who he was having the conversation with at the event organised by Intelligence Squared. “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.”
Specifically asked if he considered any women writers his equal, Sir Vidia replied: “I don’t think so.”
Seventy-eight-year-old Sir Vidia, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001, was born in Trinidad to parents of Indian origin and has lived in Britain since 1950. He is married to Lady Nadira, a former Pakistani journalist, and lives in Wiltshire.
In another controversy linked to women writers, Sir Vidia had during a 2002 function in India publicly criticised Indian writers Shashi Deshpande and Nayantara Sehgal for being “banal” and for talking about “gender oppression” and “colonialism.”
Sir Vidia, who was knighted in 1989, attributed the “different” writing by women authors to their “sentimentality and the narrow view of the world.”
“And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too,” he added.
Sir Vidia even targeted the work of his own former publisher, Diana Athill, during the 90-minute conversation. Ninety-three-year-old literary editor and author Diana Athill, who published 18 of Sir Vidia’s books, is a prize-winning writer now.
“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,” he said.
His stinging criticism was, however, reserved for Jane Austen, who he described as sentimental. He said he “couldn’t possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world.” Sir Vidia seemed to dismiss his rapprochement with his old friend Paul Theroux in the writer’s corner at Hay-on-Wye.
“He gave his name, it was a great courtesy. If he hadn’t I would have wondered, ‘Who is this person who is shaking my hand?’ Then he said his name and instinctively I said, ‘I am glad we can put an end to all this nonsense.’ I shook his hand back. I was very glad to do that,” explained Sir Vidia, whose latest book, The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief, is a travelogue.
The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain refused to react to these remarks on Thursday, saying it would be “waste of its breath.” However, Athill described his tirade against women writers as ridiculous. “He always tended toward irritability, and it seems he is losing his grip. It is ridiculous,” she told the Evening Standard.
“Taking myself out of it, you only have to think of authors like George Eliot, or Jane Austen — you cannot take it seriously. He has been asked what he genuinely feels and what he feels seems to me to be foolishness,” she added.