Amanda McKittrick Ros

Born Anna Margaret McKittrick in County Down, Ireland, Amanda McKittrick Ros (1860–1939) trained as a teacher in Dublin and married Andrew Ross, the station master at Larne, in 1887. She wrote three novels, including Delina Delaney (1898) and the unfinished Helen Huddleson, along with verse collections bearing titles such as Poems of Puncture and Fumes of Formation. Convinced of her own genius and openly contemptuous of reviewers, she answered Barry Pain's withering 1898 notice with a twenty-page preface branding him a clay crab of corruption and a half-starved upstart. She is remembered as the most celebrated bad writer in English, read with genuine delight by Aldous Huxley, Mark Twain, and the Inklings.