Аманда Маккитрик Рос: Ирландская писательница и автор «худшей прозы»

Irish writer

Anna Margaret Ross (née McKittrick; 8 December 1860 – 2 February 1939), known by her pen name Amanda McKittrick Ros, was an Irish writer. She published her first novel Irene Iddesleigh at her own expense in 1897. She wrote poetry and a number of novels. Her works were not read widely, and her eccentric, over written, "purple" circumlocutory writing is alleged by some critics to be some of the worst prose and poetry ever written.

McKittrick was born in Drumaness, County Down, on 8 December 1860, the fourth child of Eliza Black and Edward Amlave McKittrick, Principal of Drumaness High School. She went on to write three novels and dozens of poems. In 1917 Andrew Ross died, and in 1922 Ros married Thomas Rodgers (1857/58–1933), a County Down farmer.

She wrote under the pen name Amanda McKittrick Ros, possibly in an attempt to suggest a connection to the noble de Ros family of County Down. Ros was strongly influenced by the novelist Marie Corelli. She wrote: "My chief object of writing is and always has been, to write if possible in a strain all my own. This I find is why my writings are so much sought after." She imagined "the million and one who thirst for aught that drops from my pen", and predicted that she would "be talked about at the end of a thousand years." Her "admirers" included Aldous Huxley, Siegfried Sassoon, C. S. Lewis and Mark Twain. Twain considered Irene "one of the greatest unintentionally humorous novels of all time". A reader sent a copy of Irene to humorist Barry Pain, who in an 1898 review called it "a thing that happens once in a million years", and sarcastically termed it "the book of the century". He reported that he was initially entertained, but soon "shrank before it in tears and terror". Ros retorted by branding Pain a "clay crab of corruption" and wrote a twenty page preface to her second novel, Delina Delaney, in which she disparaged Pain at length and suggested that he was so hostile only because he was secretly in love with her. But Ros claimed to have made enough money from Delina Delaney to build a house, which she named Iddesleigh. In Ros' last novel, Helen Huddleson, all the characters are named after various fruits: Lord Raspberry, Cherry Raspberry, Sir Peter Plum, Christopher Currant, the Earl of Grape, Madame Pear. Of Pear, Ros wrote: "she had a swell staff of sweet faced helpers swathed in stratagem, whose members and garments glowed with the lust of the loose, sparkled with the tears of the tortured, shone with the sunlight of bribery, dangled with the diamonds of distrust, slashed with sapphires of scandals "

as of 2013, only Irene Iddesleigh is available in a modern edition. This contains appendices with Barry Pain's influential "Review" of the first edition and Thomas Beer's "introduction" to the 1926 edition along with Amanda's own venomous reactions. Her other books are rare and first editions command prices of US$300–800 on the used book market. Belfast Central Library has an archive of her papers, and Queen's University of Belfast has some volumes by Ros in the stacks. The Frank Ferguson edited collection Ulster Scots Writing: An Anthology (Four Courts, 2008) includes her poem "The Town of Tare". On 11 November 2006 as part of a 50 year celebration, librarian Elspeth Legg hosted a major retrospective of her works, culminating in a public reading by 65 delegates of the entire contents of Fumes of Formation. The theme of the workshop that followed was 'Suppose you chance to write a book', Line 17 of 'Myself' from page 2 of Fumes of Formation.