Amanda McKittrick Ros

McKittrick was born in Drumaness, County Down, on 8 December 1860, the fourth child of Eliza Black and Edward Amlave McKittrick, Principal of Drumaness High School. She went on to write three novels and dozens of poems. In 1917 Andrew Ross died, and in 1922 Ros married Thomas Rodgers (1857/58–1933), a County Down farmer. ==Writing==

She wrote under the pen-name Amanda McKittrick Ros, possibly in an attempt to suggest a connection to the noble de Ros family of County Down. Ros was strongly influenced by the novelist Marie Corelli. She wrote: "My chief object of writing is and always has been, to write if possible in a strain all my own. This I find is why my writings are so much sought after." She imagined "the million and one who thirst for aught that drops from my pen", and predicted that she would "be talked about at the end of a thousand years." Her "admirers" included Aldous Huxley, Siegfried Sassoon, C. S. Lewis and Mark Twain. Twain considered Irene "one of the greatest unintentionally humorous novels of all time". A reader sent a copy of Irene to humorist Barry Pain, who in an 1898 review called it "a thing that happens once in a million years", and sarcastically termed it "the book of the century". He reported that he was initially entertained, but soon "shrank before it in tears and terror". Ros retorted by branding Pain a "clay crab of corruption" and wrote a twenty-page preface to her second novel, Delina Delaney, in which she disparaged Pain at length and suggested that he was so hostile only because he was secretly in love with her. But Ros claimed to have made enough money from Delina Delaney to build a house, which she named Iddesleigh. In Ros' last novel, Helen Huddleson, all the characters are named after various fruits: Lord Raspberry, Cherry Raspberry, Sir Peter Plum, Christopher Currant, the Earl of Grape, Madame Pear. Of Pear, Ros wrote: "she had a swell staff of sweet-faced helpers swathed in stratagem, whose members and garments glowed with the lust of the loose, sparkled with the tears of the tortured, shone with the sunlight of bribery, dangled with the diamonds of distrust, slashed with sapphires of scandals..." Ros wrote that her critics lacked sufficient intellect to appreciate her talent, and that they conspired against her for revealing the corruption of society's ruling classes, thereby disturbing "the bowels of millions". ==Legacy==

Literary critic Northrop Frye said of Ros' novels that they use "rhetorical material without being able to absorb or assimilate it: the result is pathological, a kind of literary diabetes". Nick Page, author of ''In Search of the World's Worst Writers'', rated Ros the worst of the worst. He says that "[F]or Amanda, eyes are 'piercing orbs', legs are 'bony supports', people do not blush, they are 'touched by the hot hand of bewilderment'". Jack Loudan said that "Amanda is the most perfect instrument for measuring the sense of humour. Alert and quick witted people accept her at once: those she leaves entirely unmoved are invariably dull and unimaginative". The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature described her as "uniquely dreadful". Availability Belfast Central Library has an archive of her papers, and Queen's University of Belfast has some volumes by Ros in the stacks. The Frank Ferguson-edited collection Ulster-Scots Writing: An Anthology (Four Courts, 2008) includes her poem "The Town of Tare". On 11 November 2006 as part of a 50-year celebration, librarian Elspeth Legg hosted a major retrospective of her works, culminating in a public reading by 65 delegates of the entire contents of Fumes of Formation. The theme of the workshop that followed was 'Suppose you chance to write a book', Line 17 of 'Myself' from page 2 of Fumes of Formation. A few enthusiasts have kept her legend alive. A biography by Jack Loudan, O Rare Amanda!, was published in 1954; a collection of her most memorable passages was published in 1988, edited by Frank Ormsby, under the title Thine in Storm and Calm. Belfast Public Libraries have a large collection of manuscripts, typescripts and first editions of her work. Manuscript copies include Irene Iddesleigh, Sir Benjamin Bunn and Six Months in Hell. Typescript versions of all the above are held together with Rector Rose, St. Scandal Bags and The Murdered Heiress among others. The collection of first editions covers all her major works including volumes of her poetry, Fumes of Formation and Poems of Puncture, together with lesser known pieces such as Kaiser Bill and Donald Dudley: The Bastard Critic. The collection includes hundreds of letters addressed to Ros, many with her own comments in the margins. Also included are typed copies of her letters to newspapers, correspondence with her admiring publisher T. S. Mercer, an album of newspaper cuttings and photographs, and a script for a BBC broadcast from July 1943. In 2007 her life and works were fêted at a Belfast literary festival. Denis Johnston, the Irish playwright, wrote a radio play entitled Amanda McKittrick Ros which was broadcast on BBC Home Service radio on 25 July 1943 and subsequently. The play is published in The Dramatic Works of Denis Johnston vol. 3. Johnston acquired a collection of papers from Ros including the unfinished typescript of Helen Huddleson. These can now be seen as part of the Denis Johnston collection in the library of the Ulster University at Coleraine, Northern Ireland. ==Bibliography==