VS Naipaul, no stranger to literary spats and rows, has done it again. This time, the winner of the Nobel prize for literature has lashed out at female authors, saying there is no woman writer whom he considers his equal – and singling out Jane Austen for particular criticism. In an interview this week, Naipaul said, 1) that no woman writer could be his literary equal; 2) that Jane Austen's "sentimental sense of the world" made her his inferior; 3) "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." "And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too," he said. He added: "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."
– VS Naipaul might be one of the great writers of the 20th century, but he appears also to be a straight-up literary sexist, notes Gawker, which picks up on an interview he gave to the Guardian. In it, Naipaul says that no woman could write as well as he can; that he’s better than Jane Austen because of her “sentimental sense of the world”; and that he can identify a woman’s writing “within a paragraph or two,” because “I think (it is) unequal to me.” “And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too,” Naipaul asserts. What’s more, “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.”