The worst novelist in the world What if Amanda M. Ros was trolling her critics?

Her fate, however, was sealed from the moment an early review by the humourist Barry Pain — under the mean-spirited headline “The Book of the Century” — brought her to the attention of the literary elite. “It is enormous,” Pain had written of Irene Iddesleigh. “It makes the Eiffel Tower look short; the Alps are molehills compared to it; it is on a scale that has never before been attempted.”

Pain’s review generated so much interest among the cognoscenti that an “Amanda Ros Club” was soon established in London, where members would share their favourite passages and compete to write imitations of their own. Mark Twain said that Irene Iddesleigh was “one of the greatest unintentionally humorous novels of all time”. At meetings in Oxford, C. S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and their fellow “Inklings” would regularly challenge each other to read aloud excerpts from Ros’s books without laughing.

Her plot lines are conventional enough. The titular heroine of Irene Iddesleigh is in love with her tutor, Oscar Otwell, but is pressured by her adoptive parents into marrying the wealthy Sir John Dunfern. Inevitably, the relationship soon sours, and Dunfern is driven to a jealous rage on discovering that his wife’s true affections reside elsewhere. He imprisons her in a kind of oubliette that he calls his “room of correction”, but not before he unleashes a blistering castigation:

“Was I falsely informed of your ways and worth? 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?… Speak! Irene! Wife! Woman! Do not sit in silence and allow the blood that now boils in my veins to ooze through cavities of unrestrained passion and trickle down to drench me with its crimson hue!”

Ros had no more interest in subtext than in the opinions of her critics. And yet with some reflection she might have been grateful for Barry Pain’s scathing review. Just as Walter Pater’s reappraisal of Botticelli in his book Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) reinvigorated interest in this neglected artist, Pain had immortalised the works of Ros.

Ros didn’t quite see it that way. She responded to Pain’s review with a lengthy diatribe as a preface to her second novel Delina Delaney (1898). “This so-called Barry Pain,” she wrote, “has taken upon him to criticise a work the depth of which fails to reach the solving power of his borrowed, and, he’d have you believe, varied talent.” Her scalding review of a review even went so far as to suggest that Pain “must either have been in love, desperate love, with Irene or the author”. It was sexual tension, not literary taste, that accounted for Pain’s antipathy.

One of the most enthusiastic notices came from the pen of Aldous Huxley, who compared Ros’s highly wrought and mannered prose style to that of John Lyly, one of the “university wits” of Shakespearean England. Recommending Delina Delaney as “Mrs. Ros’s masterpiece”, Huxley went on to commend her for perfecting the style of “Euphuism” which takes its name from Lyly’s prose works Eupheus: The Anatomy of Wit (1578) and Eupheus and his England (1580).

Huxley marvelled that Ros, being completely unfamiliar with the school of Euphuism, had somehow “arrived independently at precisely the same stage of development as Lyly and his disciples”. Like these early writers, Ros had become intoxicated with the joys of verbal artifice, often at the expense of artistry, and was therefore “an Elizabethan born out of her time”.

Yet I’m not entirely convinced that Ros was oblivious to the impact of her works. I have little doubt that her first novel was published in earnest, but is it not possible that once her reputation was established she learned to play along, making those who mocked her the butt of the joke? If you read her three novels consecutively, it is clear her most derided habits seemed to escalate over time. The metaphors become more tortuous, the alliteration more insistent, the plot twists more improbable (in Delina Delaney, a supposedly long-dead cousin is eventually identified by the six toes on her right foot). Besides, Ros’s continual declarations of her own genius must surely be put down to mischief rather than delusion. At one point, she decided that her literary legacy was so secure that she was “sistering Shakespeare, Milton and Blake”.

Ros has an astonishing capacity to extend her metaphors beyond their natural remits. Mere sunlight is tedious to her, and so in Chapter III of Irene Iddesleigh she envisages a moment “when the hottest ray of that heavenly orb shall shoot its cheerful charge against the window panes”. By Ros’s standards this is restrained, and so by Chapter XVII the metaphor has sprawled beyond any sane reader’s expectations:

“The mighty orb of gladness spreads its divine halo over many a harrowed home — it encircles the great expanse of foreign adventure and home-hoarded enterprise, and wields its awakening influence against the burthened boroughs of bigotry and lightened land of liberty to a sense of gilded surprise.”

Immortal stuff, obviously. And yet I suspect it is also a sign that the author must have realised that this was precisely the kind of verbiage her fanbase craved. She could not have been unaware of the criticisms; she spent a good deal of her time seeking out all press cuttings relating to her work, even from the harshest of her detractors. In one letter to a friend, she wrote:

“I would be glad to see the critique you mentioned which appeared in the Daily Express, no matter how bad the beast described his effortless effort to sting the Author, who loves to see she can wring from the critic crabs their biting little bits of buggery! Every critique you see, cut it out and let me have it, please.”

What is this if not the knowing attitude of the professional goader? Note how Ros refers to herself in the third person, as though “the Author” is simply another one of her imaginative creations.

Over the course of her career, Ros became better and better at writing badly, and her popularity soared as a result. In this regard, she bears comparison with the New York socialite and singer Florence Foster Jenkins (1868–1944), whose operatic warbling was so popular that tickets for her show at Carnegie Hall sold out within two hours. Perhaps Ros was living in a permanent state of cognitive dissonance, or perhaps she accepted the ridicule as consolation for her fame. A more intriguing possibility is that she was engaged in an elaborate form of trolling.

When her biographer Jack Loudan once asked her why she had named one of her principal characters Lord Raspberry, Ros looked puzzled for a moment and then replied: “What else would I call him?” Loudan took this as evidence of “her complete inability to realise why people found her books amusing instead of the serious works she intended them to be”, but I’m not so sure. There are so many elements to Ros’s novels and poems which are clearly meant to be funny that I find it funnier still that they have been overlooked.

For instance, it’s striking that no critic has commented on the preface to Delina Delaney, in which our author takes a full page to bemoan the fact that she is expected to write a preface. And are we really to believe that Ros did not appreciate the humour in opening a poem about Easter with the line: “Dear Lord the day of eggs is here”? From the same volume, Fumes of Formation (1933), we have the oft-quoted “On visiting Westminster Abbey”:

“Holy Moses! Take a look!
Flesh decayed in every nook!
Some rare bits of brain lie here,
Mortal loads of beef and beer…”

As for Lord Raspberry in Helen Huddleson (published posthumously in 1969), he leads a cast of characters that includes Cherry Raspberry (his sister), Mrs Strawberry, Mrs Greengage, Sir Peter Plum, the Earl of Grape, Madam Pear, Sir Christopher Current and Lily Lentil. Is this unintentional comedy, as Mark Twain insisted, or the brilliant chicanery of one who, as one former school friend recalled, was “gay, lively and always ready for a prank”?

I’m inclined to think that Ros explicitly revealed her satirical intent in her epigraph to Poems of Puncture: “if the ‘cuddy-brained’ can’t see / Where lies the joke — Just think of me!”. A “cuddy” is an old Irish term for “donkey”, and one gets the feeling that it is perhaps the sneering intellectuals who were being led all along. When I read of poor Helen Huddleson, whisked away to a brothel known as “Modesty Manor” by the evil Madam Pear, and kissed not by her captor’s lips but by “a pair of polluted rims of rouge”, I cannot help but sense the ghost of Amanda Ros laughing along with the rest of us.

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Andrew Doyle is a comedian and creator of the Twitter persona Titania McGrath

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