A few years ago, V S Naipaul ended his career as a serious writer and began a new one as a literary stand-up comic—and a very good one at that. Blocked below is what he recently said about Jane Austen in the Literary Review.

Jane Austen?

What trouble I have with Jane Austen! Jane Austen is for those people who wish to be educated in English manners. If that isn’t part of your mission, you don’t know what to do with this material.
There was a conference at Bath a few years ago and I was invited. I was a very bad conference guest - I didn’t say a word. But they gave me a copy of Jane Austen’s novel set in Bath - Northanger Abbey. In my recent illness I’ve been looking at books I haven’t read before so I picked it up.
I thought halfway through the book, Here am I, a grown man reading about this terrible vapid woman and her so-called love life - she calls it ‘love’, having seen this fellow once. I said to myself, What am I doing with this material? This is for somebody else, really. It’s for someone down the road, not for me.

Are you then surprised that people make so much of her?

Yes, it purely depends on political power in the world. If you come from England when your country is important, then this kind of nonsensical writing becomes important for you. If the country had failed in the nineteenth century no one would have been reading Jane Austen. The books would have been about failure. They would have demonstrated the reasons for failure. I don’t want to be confused, in what I am saying about Jane Austen, with people from the Wise places, the Very Wise People who say that she represents a great hypocrisy, writing in this way about affairs of the heart and young people while there are the slaves toiling in the plantations of the Caribbean. What hypocrisy! That’s the kind of thing the Wise People do say. And it’s very foolish, because if they knew a bit more, beyond their little disciplines, they would know that the slave trade, the British slave trade, was abolished in 1807 and this wish to talk about sensibility, etc, was part of the climate that made this abolition of the trade possible and later, very quickly, in 1834, made the abolition of slavery itself possible. The idea of refinement, manner, that was the climate.