Arrogance

There's an author out there who thinks women's writing is unequal to his. Any woman, anywhere. V S Naipaul made his feelings known during an event at the Hay literary festival recently.

He won the Man Booker prize in 1971 for In a Free State. I've never heard of it, and I don't think I've read one of his books - his name was one of those on the library shelves I always passed by afer having scanned the content to see if it was of interest.

He says he can tell by reading a paragraph or two if the piece is written by a woman. What gives it away? 'Sentimentality, their narrow view of the world.' He couldn't possibly share Jane Austen's 'sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world.'

He doesn't consider any woman writer his equal.

I shouldn't be at all surprised if women give his books the old heave-ho after reading such drivel.

Helen Brown, Telegraph literary critic says: 'It certainly would be difficult to find a woman writer whose ego was equal to that of Naipaul.' She went on to quote George Eliot: 'Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.'

Check out the full article: http://www.thebookseller.com/news/women-writers-unequal-to-me-says-v-s-naipaul.html

On another topic, I don't know why Blogger has suddenly become so dffiult to use. It won't let me copy and paste from my own files, let alone from anywhere else, which means I have to do this on site as it were, and type everything out. Nor can I go back and change what I've typed. Oh, yes, and another little trick - I have to go to Edit Posts to publish my post even though there's a big button saying PUBLISH on this page.

Now it won't let me shorten the url. Grrr.