Once upon a time, Virginia Woolf wrote, ?It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.? Then, corsets were more popular than sports bras, women?s brains were considered inferior to men?s. Today, we live in a world of Born This Way and a US First Lady who appears more muscular than her husband. We know sexism still lives amongst us and gender prejudice still takes on violent faces every now and then, here and there. But we don?t expect our leading writers, our philosophers, our Nobel prize winners to affirm such prejudices. So VS Naipaul has shocked us. He claims he can read a piece of writing and tell within a paragraph or two that it has been written by a woman, because what comes through in her writing is that she is not master of a house, she is sentimental, her world view is narrow, all the feminine tosh is glaring. With such powers of deduction, Naipaul must find reading a pretty dreary exercise. Few mysteries and little suspension of belief must be his lot. That, seriously, is a sorry state of affairs.
One of the female characters in Jane Austen (whom Naipaul dismisses as sentimental and nowhere near him in greatness) notes that, ?Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.? But wisdom is a subjective affair. Naipaul, who often waxes eloquent about his father?s literary gifts, has the right to dislike Austen, Beauvoir, Morrison, Rowling, Plath and so on. But the dislike doesn?t prove that women writers are inferior. All it proves is that this writer?s critical abilities are definitely on the decline, and out of time.