“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!”
As to who the worst writer of all time might be there was once room for debate. In 1897, with the publication of a novel called Irene Iddesleigh, debate ceased. At a stroke pretenders like Bulwer-Lytton (“It was a dark and stormy night”) were swept aside, and Amanda McKittrick Ros of Ireland took the crown. She wears it still. Like the cheese she stands alone.
“She tried hard to keep herself a stranger to her poor old father’s slight income by 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.”
Those stylistic anorexics, Strunk and White, would no doubt have preferred, “She took up needlework,” but to the authoress, as we see, omitting needless words was for sheep.
Aldous Huxley, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkein and others gathered to read aloud from her work. Reviewers — well, you can imagine, but Ros flung defiance at them. She never doubted her worth as an artist. What more do you need to get through life than a roaring belief in yourself?
SONG OF THE DAY: Kelly Hunt, “You Make Me High”
