"Naipaul’s sympathy for the political and emotional fragility of his characters did not extend, alas, to his wife."

"His brutally fulfilling affair with Margaret Gooding—'I wished to possess her as soon as I saw her,' he tells his biographer—gradually voided a passionless marriage. In the mid-nineteen-seventies, husband and wife began to spend more and more time apart, as Naipaul travelled on ceaseless journalistic assignments. Naipaul’s sister Savi suggests that once [Naipaul's wife] Pat realized that she would not have children, and that her husband was committedly unfaithful, she lost her confidence as a woman. This is an extraordinary biography because Patrick French has had access both to Pat’s diaries and to searching interviews with Naipaul, whose candor is formidable: as always, one feels that while Naipaul may often be wrong, he is rarely untruthful, and, indeed, that he is likely to uncover twenty truths on the path to error. Pat’s diaries make for painful reading: 'I felt assaulted but I could not defend myself.' 'He has been increasingly frenzied and sadly, from my point of view, hating and abusing me.' Pat died of breast cancer in 1996. 'It could be said that I had killed her,' Naipaul tells French. 'It could be said. I feel a little bit that way.'"

From "Wounder And Wounded/V. S. Naipaul’s empire" by James Wood, originally published in The New Yorker in 2008, featured on The New Yorker front page today because Naipaul died yesterday.

ADDED: I'm interested in the notion that a woman has "confidence as a woman." It suggests that there is a special sort of confidence situated in sexuality, fertility, and motherhood and that a woman without that sort of confidence is not much of anything at all or will feel like nothing much and be unable to muster up any alternative reason for being.