Author Claims All Women Writers Suck, Even Jane Austen

Jun 02, 2011 21:52

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 at the Royal Geographic Society on Tuesday about his career, Naipaul, who has been described as the "greatest living writer of English prose", was asked if he considered any woman writer his literary match. He replied: "I don't think so." Of Austen he said he "couldn't possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world".

He felt that women writers were "quite different". He said: "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."



The author, who was born in Trinidad, said this was because of women's "sentimentality, 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 said. (WTF? Not master of a house?? What does that even mean?)

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." (Oh? No offense? well why didn't you say so in the first place?)

The criticism from the author is unsurprising. Naipaul is no stranger to criticism. In the past Naipaul has criticized India's top female authors for their "banality" on the topic he is best known for writing about, the legacy of British colonialism.
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The comments were dismissed by the Writers Guild of Great Britain, which said it would not "waste its breath on them". Literary journalist Alex Clark said: "Is he really saying that writers such as Hilary Mantel, AS Byatt, Iris Murdoch are sentimental or write feminine tosh?"

Literary critic Helen Brown described them as "arrogant, attention-seeking".He should heed the words of George Eliot - a female writer - whose works have had a far more profound impact on world culture than his."

SOURCE
The Guardian's Quiz debunking this shit
ONTD version which also tears this fuckwit apart

This guy deserves a nice

excuze me wtf r u doin, god damn, you stay classy, wtf, fail, bawww, flames on the side of my face, thank you! fuck you!, stupid people, not the onion, books, how to win friends and influence people, oh not this shit again, trolls gone wild, reaction .gif post, scumbags, fuckery, this is why we cant have nice things, irl troll, sexism, people suck, facepalm

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