Amanda McKittrick Ros

Amanda McKittrick Ros (1860–1939) was an Irish novelist and poet from County Down who has been called, with affection, the worst writer ever to see print. A schoolteacher married to the stationmaster at Larne, she published her first novel, Irene Iddesleigh, in 1897 at her husband's expense, following it with Delina Delaney and volumes of verse. Her alliterative, overheated prose attracted a cult of admirers that included Mark Twain and Aldous Huxley, and the Oxford circle of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien held contests to see who could read her aloud longest without laughing. Ros took her critics seriously and answered them at length.