Irene Iddesleigh Author:Amanda McKittrick Ros "Who was the worst novelist in history? A schoolmistress from Northern Ireland whose novels were so uniquely and thrillingly terrible that, in the early years of the last century, she became an ironic cause célèbre among the cultural luminaries of her time. "There were Amanda McKittrick Ros societies at Oxford and Cambridge. C.S.Lewis, J.R.R.Tol... more »kien, and their fellow Inklings held 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. "This stuff is, in lowish doses, quite entertaining, but if you read enough of it, its absurdity seems to spread outward to the whole of literature. Ros' writing is not just bad, in other words; its badness is so potent that it seems to undermine the very idea of literature. "The book has not amused. It began by doing that. Then, as its enormities went on getting more and more enormous in every line, the book seemed something titanic, gigantic, awe-inspiring. The world was full of Irene Iddesleigh, and I shrank before it in tears and in terror." ?from Epic Fail by Mark O'Connell« less