Amanda McKittrick Ros - The Worst Novelist in History?

Writer Amanda McKittrick Ros is often said to be the worst novelist in history. She thought she was a misunderstood literary genius but few agreed. However, her work arguably strays into the 'so bad it's good' territory and can still be read today.

Amanda was born in 1860 in Country Down, Ireland, and moved to Larne in Northern Ireland, where she met her husband Andrew Ross. He financed the publication of her first novel Irene Iddesleigh as a gift on their tenth wedding anniversary, thus launching her literary career onto an unsuspecting nation. She went on to write two more novels and dozens of poems, and died in 1939.

Of her Victorian contemporaries, Mark Twain was said to be a fan - perhaps because he was so amused when reading of eyes as 'piercing orbs', or legs described as 'bony supports', or that to blush is to be touched 'by the hot hand of bewilderment.'

However, McKittrick Ros could hold her own with any critic's jibes. She referred to those who abused her work as the 'auctioneering agents of Satan' , or 'bastard donkey-headed mites', or the 'clay crabs of corruption'. She also claimed their venom was the direct result of jealousy - or else of being secretly in love with her.

Apparently the Inklings, an Oxford literary discussion group active from the early ’30s to 1949 which included J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, would sometimes have a party game to see who could read Ros' work for the longest without laughing.

Her poem Visiting Westminster Abbey begins with 'Holy Moses! Take a look! Flesh decayed in every nook!'.

Her unique literary style is illustrated by the fact that most of the characters in her novel Helen Huddleson are named after fruits or vegetables - with Lord Raspberry, Sir Christopher Currant, Madam Pear, and Lily Lentil.

These are the opening lines of the novel, Irene Iddesleigh,

'Sympathise with me, indeed! Ah, no! Cast your sympathy on the chill waves of troubled waters; fling it on the oases of futurity; dash it against the rock of gossip; or, better still, allow it to remain within the false and faithless bosom of buried scorn,'

If this has whetted your appetite for unintentionally hilarious high drama, the rest of the novel is available free on Kindle.