One of the more illuminating pieces of criticism on Ros’ work is Aldous Huxley’s essay “Euphues Redivivus,” which he published in his collection On the Margin in 1923. There is an intention toward metaphor-a lunge in the general direction of the literary-but an obvious misunderstanding of how such things work (and often, for that matter, how syntax works). In a way, Ros’ prose amounts to a sort of accidental surrealism. They read them for their rigorously terrible sentences and for the masochistic pleasures of translating them into something like sense. It isn’t for their plots that people read Ros’ novels. At least, I think that’s what happens I wouldn’t want to fully commit to that interpretation. (It’s not clear from Ros’ narration, which is nominally omniscient but still frequently leaves the reader unenlightened.) He then drowns himself, and Irene decides to cut her losses and return to England. That night, he comes home drunk and either rapes Irene or just says a lot of horrible things to her. The tutor in question, Oscar Otwell, turns out to be a total boozehound and gets sacked for being oiled up on the job. Over 189 pages, Irene Iddesleightells the story of a young Canterbury lady who marries an older man, realizes she doesn’t love him, and then elopes to America with her tutor. The novel isn’t, in any conventional sense, a page-turner. For their 10 th wedding anniversary, she convinced Andrew to put up the cash to have her first novel, Irene Iddesleigh, printed in Dublin. When she began to write novels, she did so under the pseudonym Amanda McKittrick Ros, taking the name Amanda from an Irish romantic novel and dropping the second S in her husband’s surname in order to imply a connection with the noble de Ros family of County Down. She was born Anna McKittrick in the village of Drumaness in 1860 and became Anna Ross when, after taking up a teaching position in Larne, she married the town’s stationmaster, Andrew Ross.
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