Amanda McKittrick Ross

Amanda McKittrick Ros (1860–1939) (born Anna Margaret McKittrick, later Anna Ross) was an Irish writer. Many, including Mark Twain, Aldous Huxley, and Wyndham Lewis considered her writing to be amusingly bad. Her novels were initially published privately.

Her first novel, Irene Iddesleigh, was reviewed by humorist Barry Pain who sarcastically called it "the book of the century." Ros retorted by calling Pain a "clay crab of corruption." Ros may be considered to have had the last laugh, for her fame has outlasted his; furthermore, she made enough money from her second novel, Delina Delaney, to build a house, which she named Iddeleigh.

Nick Page, author of In Search of the World's Worst Writers, rated her the worst of the worst. He says that "For Amanda, eyes are 'piercing orbs', legs are 'bony supports', people do not blush, they are 'touched by the hot hand of bewilderment.'"

Aldous Huxley wrote that "In Mrs. Ros we see, as we see in the Elizabethan novelists, the result of the discovery of art by an unsophisticated mind and of its first conscious attempt to produce the artistic. It is remarkable how late in the history of every literature simplicity is invented.... This is how she tells us that Delina earned money by doing needlework:

She tried hard to keep herself a stranger to her poor old father's slight income by the use of the finest production of steel, whose blunt edge eyed the reely covering with marked greed, and offered its sharp dart to faultless fabrics of flaxen fineness.

Her novel Delina Delaney begins:

Have you ever visited that portion of Erin's plot that offers its sympathetic soil for the minute survey and scrutinous examination of those in political power, whose decision has wisely been the means before now of converting the stern and prejudiced, and reaching the hand of slight aid to share its strength in augmenting its agricultural richness?

Page comments: "I first read this sentence nearly three years ago. Since then, I have read it once a week in an increasingly desperate search for meaning. But I still don't understand it."

A poet as well as a novelist, Ros wrote Poems of Puncture and Fumes of Formation. The latter contains "Visiting Westminster Abbey," which opens:

Holy Moses! Have a look!

Flesh decayed in every nook!

Some rare bits of brain lie here,

Mortal loads of beef and beer,

Some of whom are turned to dust,

Every one bids lost to lust;

Royal flesh so tinged with 'blue'

Undergoes the same as you.

As of 2004, none of her works are in print. Her books are rare and first editions command prices of $300 to $800 in the used-book market.

Bibliography

• Irene Iddesleigh (novel, 1897)
• Delina Delaney (novel, 1898)
• Poems of Puncture (poetry, 1912)
• Fumes of Formation (poetry, 1933)
• Helen Huddleston (posthumous novel)

• Jack Loudan (1954) O Rare Amanda!: The Life of Amanda McKittrick Ros (London: Chatto & Windus 1954)

External links

• The Rocks of Regard—A brief guide to the life of Amanda McKittrick Ros
• Author information from EIRData
• The Oasis of Futurity "A Shrine to the Late-Lamented Amanda McKittrick Ros"
• Euphues Redivivus, Aldous Huxley's essay on Ros

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