Let us now praise the Irish, that immortal race of bards which has given so much and so many to the literary world. Jonathan Swift, W. B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, and Seamus Heaney to name a few. What, then, are we to make of Amanda McKittrick Ross, who is to be honored — as “The World’s Worst Novelist” — on the evening of September 26 at a special event which closes a festival celebrating Literary Belfast.

Apparently Amanda’s fans included Siegfried Sassoon, Anthony Powell, C. S. Lewis and Mark Twain. Aldous Huxley expressed his admiration for her writing in an essay which included some of his favorite examples of her bizarre usage.

Amanda was a writer who would not settle for “Sunday” — so bald, so common — preferring the phrase “sanctified measures of time” instead. She found “globes of glare” to be so much more — well, so much more syllabic, at any rate — than “eyes”; and chose “globules of liquid lava” where a lesser writer might have stopped (far short of the mark) at “sweat.”

Modern readers will have difficulty getting a good dose of Amanda McKittrick Ross’s inimitable style, since all of her novels are now out of print. Samples can be found in Nick Page’s anthology In Search of the World’s Worst Writers (Harper Collins), and from the website promoting that book I offer some excerpts, beginning with one of Amanda’s most famous quotes (from Irene Iddesleigh):

“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!”

and this gem, the opening sentence from Delina Delaney, her second novel:

Have you ever visited that portion of Erin’s plot that offers its sympathetic soil for the minute survey and scrutinous examination of those in political power, whose decision has wisely been the means before now of converting the stern and prejudiced, and reaching the hand of slight aid to share its strength in augmenting its agricultural richness?

As Nick Page puts it, the sentence “is magnificent in its impenetrable mystery; it is the riddle of the sphinx, the smile of the Mona Lisa. It sounds wonderful, but remains impervious to comprehension.”

The Belfast event to celebrate Amanda McKittrick Ross takes the form of a competition, the winner being the participant who is able “to read the longest passage from Amanda’s work without laughing.”