Patricia Hale met VS Naipaul at Oxford in 1952, both exiles in different ways: she from a modest Birmingham home, he from the heat and dislocation of Trinidad. She was 19, the first in her family to reach university, and the only pupil from her state school to win a place at Oxford. He was shy, uncertain, and hungry for recognition. She steadied him with the confidence of her belief in him, in his work as a writer.
They married in 1955, despite the misgivings of both sets of parents and Naipaul’s own diffidence (Patricia bought her own wedding ring.)
The Guardian has profiled Patricia Hale as someone who “gave up everything–her family, her future, her faith in herself–to marry a scholarship boy with no prospects, contacts or money”.
From the start, the marriage was skewed. Naipaul, brimming with talent but insecure in stature, required constant reassurance and practical support. Patricia gave both unreservedly. “I have absolute faith in your ultimate ability to do something great,” she reportedly told him, even before his career took off. She earned a degree in history at Oxford but abandoned her personal ambitions–including a dream of becoming an actress–at his insistence.
While VS Naipaul struggled to write and publish, it was Patricia who paid the bills by working as a teacher. She typed his manuscripts late into the night, edited his prose, and soothed his fears. The late Patrick French, Naipaul’s biographer, wrote in The World Is What It Is (Picador/Faber, 2008) that in the early years she was “the stronger … working as a teacher to support them, helping him through the early rejections and a bout of depression, grounding him in an English society notoriously unwelcoming to outsiders”.
In 1957, VS Naipaul finally published his first novel, and by 1961, his seminal A House for Mr Biswas appeared–triumphs made possible, in no small part, by Patricia’s behind-the-scenes devotion.
From the fragile young man she first met at Oxford emerged a writer who, in the words of the New York Review of Books, would be regarded as “the greatest living writer in English”. With every recognition–the Booker Prize for In a Free State in 1971, the stark brilliance of A Bend in the River in 1979, the controversial travel books that dissected postcolonial societies, and finally the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001–he rose, and she shrank.
Far from being grateful, he diminished her. “From a purely selfish point of view, you are the ideal wife for a future GOM [Grand Old Man] of letters,” he once told her, reducing her to a convenience. Her diary, unearthed years after her death, responded: “I felt assaulted but could not defend myself.”
In the 1960s, Patricia left her job to travel with him, serving as amanuensis, editor, archivist, and caretaker. But in the 1970s came the deepest wound. VS Naipaul began a long affair with Margaret Murray, an Argentinian woman who was everything Patricia was not—dependent, uninhibited, and passionate. “I was liberated. She was destroyed. It was inevitable,” he told French.
For nearly 20 years, Patricia endured his double life, retreating to a London flat when Margaret came to stay. In her journals, she never wrote Margaret’s name, only “she”. To survive, she turned to sleeping pills. Outwardly, she maintained her role as Lady Naipaul after his knighthood in 1990. Inwardly, she was breaking.
Patricia sought solace in the precedent of Jane Welsh Carlyle, who had also sacrificed her gifts for her husband’s career. In a 1975 diary entry, she wrote: “She voluntarily yielded her emotions and her talents to their relationship … She was brilliant … her genius went into their life together.” She clung to this ideal of marital devotion even as her own reality offered no equality. French observed that Naipaul’s ego was too fragile and narcissistic for partnership. There could be only one star in that union.
Years of emotional strain took a physical toll on Patricia. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1989. VS Naipaul did little to look after her. Instead, in 1994, he delivered one final, cruel cut. During an interview with The New Yorker, Naipaul freely admitted that he had been “a great prostitute man” throughout his marriage. For the intensely private Patricia, hearing of her husband’s decades of paid infidelities–and hearing it in a prestigious magazine–was shattering. She wept upon reading the article, “tearful and wounded”.
The public humiliation was worse than any private anguish she had endured. Shortly after this incident, Patricia’s cancer returned aggressively. Naipaul himself later acknowledged the lethal weight of that heartbreak. “The revelation destroyed the idea that she had ever made me happy, and the insult … was lethal,” he said, conceding, “It could be said that I had killed her … I feel a little bit that way.”
Patricia spent her final months largely alone, in what French describes as a “solitary decline”. Naipaul was often away on book business–fittingly, he was in the Far East researching an Islam travelogue when she died in early 1996. She was 64.
Two months later, VS Naipaul remarried—Pakistani journalist Nadira Alvi, nearly 20 years his junior, whom journalist Humra Quraishi pronounced “overbearing” (The Metro Gnome, November 10, 2012). (This was also my experience when VS Naipaul was honoured by the University of the West Indies in 2007, when the “Lady” Alvi Naipaul, the gatekeeper, was screeching at the crowd like a vendor: “No old books for signing, new books only.”)
In the years following Patricia’s death, Naipaul did something surprising–impossible to know if it was a nod to the truth he treasured or a sudden attack of conscience. For his authorised biography, he gave Patrick French unfettered access to his papers and, most startlingly, to Patricia’s diary—25 years of intimate reflections he had never himself read.
The biography that emerged, The World Is What It Is (2008), pulled no punches. French painted a devastating portrait of Naipaul’s selfishness and cruelty, but he also resurrected Patricia from the margins of her husband’s story. Her diaries revealed her role in shaping his work, her loyalty, and her suffering. French wrote, “It puts Patricia Naipaul on a par with Sonia Tolstoy, Jane Carlyle, Leonard Woolf—tragic literary spouses erased by history.”
In 2011, fifty years after A House for Mr Biswas, Naipaul rededicated it to “Patricia Ann Hale Naipaul, who had served as first reader, editor, and critic of his writings.” A sparse epitaph, yet behind it lay a lifetime of unacknowledged labour and love.
Her fate could have been like that of many famous artists’ wives, whose labours were erased. But like Sophia Tolstoy, who hand-copied War and Peace seven times and left her own diary, Patricia kept a record. Her voice endures, preserved by Naipaul’s insistence on the brutal truth—a characteristic that proved redemptive.
In her journals, she created an identity beyond being a great man’s wife. Through French’s biography, she has at last claimed her place in the world. In the history of Caribbean and English literature, Patricia Hale Naipaul will be remembered not only as the woman who buttressed VS Naipaul, but as a tragic figure herself—the woman who built a genius and was broken by him.
Ira Mathur is a Guardian Media columnist and winner of the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction for her memoir Love The Dark Days. Visit www.irasroom.org. Email: irasroom@gmail.com
