Worst novelist in history?

[AdamSmith]

Never heard of her before, but sounds irresistable...

Is Amanda McKittrick Ros the worst novelist in history?

There's a very strong case for the fruity prose of the 19th-century author who dreamed up Lord Raspberry and Lily Lentil

Who can fail better? ... rubber stamp. Photograph: Andrew Paterson / Alamy

Posted by Alison Flood
Friday 19 April 2013 06.41 EDT guardian.co.uk

I've played Ex Libris – well, our own free version – with my family every Christmas for years. I hate it, because I feel I should be good at it, and still never win. My everlasting thanks, then, to GalleyCat , for pointing me towards the discovery of a new literary competition with which – if I practise regularly – I'm planning to wipe the floor with them come December.

Please forgive my ignorance, but I hadn't heard of Amanda McKittrick Ros until yesterday, and I feel I've missed out on years of fun. Apparently the worst novelist ever – and a quick glance at her work shows she can lay a lot more claim to the title than poor old Edward Bulwer-Lytton – the late 19-century writer was an obsession of Lewis, Tolkien and their fellow Inklings, according to Mark O'Connell's history of the worst things ever, Epic Fail. They would – and here is my plan – hold "sporadic Ros reading competitions, in which the winner was the member who could read from one of her novels for the longest without breaking into laughter".

I haven't had a chance to read all of Irene Iddesleigh, or Delina Delaney – but believe me, I soon plan to rectify that. O'Connell provides some winning examples: "Eyes are 'globes of glare.' When their owners are unhappy, these globes are 'stuffed with sorrow'. Trousers are not trousers; they are 'the southern necessary'," he writes, before highlighting this extraordinary sentence from Delina Delaney: "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." (That is, Delina did some work as a seamstress so she wouldn't have to live off her father.)"

It gets better. O'Connell tells us that "most of the characters in her last novel, Helen Huddleson, were named after fruits and vegetables (from aristocrats like Lord Raspberry and Sir Christopher Currant right down the social scale to Madam Pear and Lily Lentil the servant girl)".

Here's the opener to Irene Iddesleigh – my mind is boggled: "Sympathise with me, indeed! Ah, no! Cast your sympathy on the chill waves of troubled waters; fling it on the oases of futurity; dash it against the rock of gossip; or, better still, allow it to remain within the false and faithless bosom of buried scorn," Ros writes. "Such were a few remarks of Irene as she paced the beach of limited freedom, alone and unprotected. Sympathy can wound the breast of trodden patience,— it hath no rival to insure the feelings we possess, save that of sorrow."

Here's the first lovers' glance between Delina Delaney and Lord Gifford : "Could a king, a prince, a duke – nay, even one of those ubiquitous invisibles who, we are led to believe, accompanies us when thinking, speaking, or acting – could even this sinless atom refrain from tainting its spotless gear with the wish of a human heart, as those grey eyes looked in bashful tenderness into the glittering jet revolvers that reflected their sparkling lustre from nave to circumference, casting a deepened brightness over the whole features of an innocent girl, and expressing, in invisible silence, the thoughts, nay, even the wish, of a fleshy triangle whose base had been bitten by order of the Bodiless Thinker."

Fleshy triangle indeed. I think I am falling headlong into a new obsession. Ros also loathed all her critics, calling them variously "bastard donkey-headed mites" and "clay crabs of corruption", asked her publisher if she should take a stab at the Nobel (thank you again Mark O'Connell for this gem: "What think you of this prize?" she asked. "Do you think I should make a 'dart' for it?"), and wrote fantastically awful poetry. Here's her "Verses 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."

Anyway, it's clearly going to take some practice if I'm to win the Inkling game this Christmas, so I'm off to get reading. Join me, if you will, and share your favourite Ros nuggets below. Or do tell, if you think there's a better contender for worst ever novelist – but I will take some convincing.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2013/apr/19/worst-novelist-in-history

[Guest CharliePS]

I must admit that I, who have read the complete works of James Elroy Flecker, have never even heard of Amanda McKittrick Ros. I wonder if she was a favorite of Spiro Agnew, that other great lover of alliterative phraseology ("nattering nabobs of negativism," etc.).

[AdamSmith]

I meant to say: James Elroy Flecker!? (Interrobang, were we permitted such here.) In fulfillment of one of your more dire PhD requirements, I hope. I confess never to have heard of him until your post.

But then I did not even know Cranford until it was on TV. After StuCotts (sore missed here) made some remark on Gaskell, that sent me to tear through the book, loving it. Sort of like a Middlemarch except built by a lame, one-armed carpenter, with no architect in attendance.

About all I can claim comparable to your Flecker is to have plowed through most of Eliza Cook and Felicia Hemans. I forget why, unless it was first finding them in The Stuffed Owl. I did forego Martin Farquhar Tupper.

Speaking of, I do think I have one parody anthology yet in me: Waiting around in Penn Station for Amtrak, one frequently hears, on the PA announcing the local-line stops, "Elizabeth Linden Rahway," which it strikes me must have been the name of a 19th-century poetess laureate of New Jersey.

[Guest CharliePS]

Although Flecker was a Ph.D. requirement, I rather enjoyed his Hassan. Unfortunately, one of my stranger professors thought Storm Jameson was the greatest unappreciated English novelist--ghastly!