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Telegraph turns to terrible teller of tales

Largely forgotten nowadays, Amanda McKittrick Ros was a writer who counted Mark Twain, Aldous Huxley, and C.S. Lewis among her adoring admirers. She was also a notorious hack. Ros, the alliteration-addicted Irish novelist who died in 1939, will be resurrected next week at the closing event of the Celebrate Literary Belfast festival. The event (which is of course called “The World’s Worst Novelist”), will take place in a pub and includes a competition to determine who can read the longest Ros passage out loud without laughing.

With passages like the following, taken from Ros’s first novel Irene Iddesleigh, this task might be trickier than it sounds:

“Was I duped to ascend the ladder of liberty, the hill of harmony, the tree of triumph, and the rock of regard, and when wildly manifesting my act of ascension, was I to be informed of treading still in the valley of defeat?”

At first glance, this whole thing might seem malicious — talented, literary giants picking on pedestrian-yet-earnest chick-lit of the past — but Ros was not a particularly humble woman. As The Telegraph points out, she was “a social climber” who “changed her married name from Ross to Ros in a spurious attempt to link herself with the ancient family of de Ros, and she claimed that the McKittricks were descended from King Sitric of Denmark.”

And she always had a nasty word for her critics, calling them “clay-crabs of corruption” and “evil minded snapshots of spleen.”

Hmm… evil-minded snapshots of spleen. There’s a nice ring to that.

Related links:
Read The Telegraph story here
Go here to read more from Irene Iddesleigh

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