Another Bad Writer
Amanda McKittrick Ros (1860–1939) counted Aldous Huxley and Mark Twain among her admirers — and not because she was good. With titles like Six Months in Hell, Fumes of Formation, and Poems of Puncture, Ros’ novels and verse achieved a kind of Olympian awfulness:
Her uncle replied ‘Ah dear Helen, I feel heart sick of this frivolous frittery fraternity of fragiles flitting round and about Earth’s huge plane wearing their mourning livery of religion as a cloak of design tainted with the milk of mockery,’ wiping his moistened brow with a crimson handkerchief, while Helen acquiesced, Henry Jnr remaining silent.
J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis competed to read her work without laughing; Northrop Frye described it as “a kind of literary diabetes.” But she had the last laugh, earning a checkered immortality where most of her critics have been forgotten.
