This post is an excerpt from
this article.
Amanda McKittrick Ros is believed by many to be one of the
greatest bad writers who ever lived. How do you earn a distinction like that? You earn it by opening your novels with sentences like this...
"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?"How Bad Was She?Amanda McKittrick Ros absolutely refused to describe anything in a straightforward, understandable-by-anyone kind of way. Instead, "needlework" was "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"; eyes were "piercing orbs"; legs were "bony supports"; people didn't blush, they were "touched by the hot hand of bewilderment"; and breasts were "lactose engorged orbs of enjoymentastical funliness." We might have made one of those up.
The phantasmal visage of the elderly feminine figure of Amanda McKittrick Ros reflects the tranquil knowledge that she may be the least comprehended and thus most deplorable of scribes (this old woman sucks at writing).
Oh, and that sentence above about Erin's plot? Apparently it has something to do with the western borders of Ireland. But you already figured that out, right?
People Actually Paid For This Crap?No publisher in their right mind was going to touch Ros's first novel, Irene Iddesleigh, so her husband
financed the publishing himself as a 10th anniversary wedding gift to his artistically challenged wife. It was destined to languish in obscurity like 99 percent of self-published novels do until someone sent a copy of the book to humorist Barry Pain, who called it "a thing that happens once in a million years" in an 1898 review.
She soon developed a following among fellow writers. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien often
held competitions to see who could read her work the longest without bursting into laughter.
Mark Twain called Irene Iddesleigh "one of the greatest unintentionally hilarious novels of all time," a statement that we'll probably use as the basis for an article sometime in the near future.
Even more impressively, Ros managed to turn this notoriety into a career, eventually earning enough cash to buy a house which she named "Iddesleigh" as a retort to her critics. To this day, a first edition Irene Iddesleigh sells for
hundreds of dollars, while the chances of anyone buying any of those one cent copies of your self-published robot based romance novel you listed on Amazon.com remain hilariously slim.
Dilber MC Theme by HarzeM
