Budding novelists are always instructed to start their books in an arresting fashion. L.P. Hartley knew exactly what he was doing in The Go-Between (1953): “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” As did Anthony Burgess in Earthly Powers (1980): “It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.”
But how about this?
“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.”
Such is the stirring overture of Irene Iddesleigh (1897) of Amanda M. Ros, a woman whose name is now invariably followed by the descriptor “the worst novelist in history”. On one level, it’s an astonishing accomplishment for the wife of a humble stationmaster in County Antrim: someone who was destined for obscurity rather than ignominy.
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.
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