DOES a flickering flame still burn for that redoubtable old ink dipper, Mrs Amanda McKittrick Ros, a once celebrated Irish writer who has largely been forgotten? As Amanda would have said herself: "oh, the fleeting fortune of fickle fame!"
The literary entrepreneurs who run the Irish summer school industry rarely miss a trick. Most dead scribblers: worth their salt have been nabbed for a pleasant summer school in some quaint country setting by an enterprising academic or chamber of commerce, but the bookish spivs have missed out on Mrs Ros. In her time, the lady of Larne was feted the world over as "the world's worst novelist".
Her prose was so uniquely dreadful that she attracted a cult following. Aldous Huxley was moved to write an essay in tribute to her florid prose and there was once a society at Cambridge University which met regularly for readings and discussions of her novels and poems.
For the small band of Ros enthusiasts, next year marks a special anniversary - it is the centenary of the publication of," her first novel, the deliciously dire Irene Iddesleigh, the book - that put Mrs Ros on the literary map. When he was sent a copy by a Belfast engineer, Mr John Homer, Mark Twain was quick to recognise her genius. Twain said the novel was "enchanting" and acclaimed it as one of the great works of "Hogwash Literature".
The novel tells the story of Irene Iddesleigh, a "beam of life's bright rays", who marries a nobleman and then runs away to America with her tutor, a Mr Oscar Otwell, leaving behind a son. A passage where Irene's husband angrily calls for his will, to be changed is typical of McKittrick Ros's alliterative style. Ordering the will to be produced, he:
"Demanded then and there that the pen of persuasion be dipped into the ink of revenge and spread thickly along the paragraph of blood related charity to blank the intolerable words that referred to the woman he was now convinced, beyond doubt, had braved the bridge of bigamy."
Peasant girls
As one critic has remarked, the events in a Ros novel complement the style. Lords always fall in love with peasant girls at first sight; and it is by no means unusual for a character to drop dead of shock upon hearing bad news. The conventions of time and possibility are happily ignored - like many writers of the pulp genre she liked to carry coincidence to the point of absurdity.
Born near Ballynahinch in Co Down in 1860, Amanda McKittrick was the daughter of a school principal and trained as a teacher at Marlborough College, Dublin, before taking up a post in Larne. Her full name, she claimed, was Amanda Malvina Fitzalan Anna Margaret McLelland McKittrick Ros; and she boasted that she was a direct descendent of King Sitric of Denmark.
After marrying Andrew Ross, the local station master in Larne, the writer quickly dropped the second "s" from her name, hoping to be identified with a Co Down family of noble lineage called de Ros. She was always keen to exaggerate her husband's achievements and, much to the amusement of his acquaintances in Larne she once described him as a "fine English scholar, who could speak Russian, French and Norwegian fluently".
The kindly Mr Ross paid for the printing of Irene Iddesleigh as a 10th wedding anniversary present and the novel became famous when the humorist Barry Pain ironically described it as "the book of the century" in a magazine review. Pain who became one of the novelist's arch enemies, said the book amused him at first but its "enormities" became so overwhelming that he "shrank before it in tears and terror"
Although Mrs Ros owed much of her initial fame to Pain's writings, his review was to start a war between the writer and critics which continued until the novelist's death. In the introduction to her second novel, De/in a Delaney, she lambasted Pain as a "cancerous irritant wart".
During her career, literary reviewers were variously castigated as "bastard donkey headed mites", "clay crabs of corruption", "egotistical earth worms", and most colourfully of all, "evil minded snapshots of spleen".
A conspiracy
Mrs Ros genuinely believed that the critics had joined in a conspiracy to destroy her because her books, which were beyond their comprehension, showed up the corruption of high society. The brickbats of critics, usually followed by bitter revenge, did not stop the two Ros novels becoming popular, and she finally found a publisher in 1926.
Few Irish writers have been so inundated with fan mail but, one cannot be certain how much of this adulation was serious. Osbert Sitwell suggested that the literary elite of the time was "short of a joke".
Her hatred of critics was only matched by her contempt for lawyers - "the greatest of all living hounds". She was notoriously litigious, involving herself, in numerous wrangles, including a five year court battle over the ownership of a lime kiln.
In her third novel, Helen Huddleson, published posthumously, she veers far away from the plot to tell the story of a lawyer who is convicted of forgery and kills a servant in order to avoid paying her wages.
The novelist frequently sent her characters on unnecessary journeys to make a point. In her second novel, the heroine Delina makes an apparently pointless trip to Stranraer so that she can encounter Andrew Ross (Amanda's real life husband) in Larne. He is described as a station agent "whose genial, manner and exemplary courteousness are widely known".
Memorable journeys
One of the more memorable journeys in her writing is Helen Huddleson's transatlantic trip, which is recorded in a single dramatic sentence:
"They reached Canada after a very pleasant trip across the useful pond that stimulates the backbone of commerce more than any other known element since Noah, captain of the flood, kicked the bucket."
Sadly, the works of Amanda McKittrick Ros are not readily available. However, I recently came across a fine anthology of, her greatest hits, An Amanda McKittrick Ros Reader, published by Blackstaff Press, with an introduction by one of the country's few Ros scholars, Frank Ormsby.