by johnnyFive

Amanda McKittrick Ros (real name Anna Margaret Ross) wrote around the turn of the 20th century, and is a classic example of overdoing it.

C.S. Lewis and Tolkien (along with their group the Inklings) used to sit around and read Ros' work to see who could go the longest without laughing. She was apparently an incredible snob, and changed her name to Ros in an attempt to link herself with a more prestigious family. As the compiler of an anthology of her work noted,

She had the absolute seriousness of someone who is terminally deluded.

She prefaced a later book with a denunciation of a critic of the first. Meanwhile, Aldous Huxely devoted an essay to her, saying

In Mrs. Ros we see. as we see in the Elizabethan novelists, the result of the discovery of art by an unsophisticated mind and of its first conscious attempt to produce the artistic. It is remarkable how late in the history of every literature simplicity is invented. The first attempts of any people to be consciously literary are always productive of the most elaborate artificiality.

[...]

This is how she tells us that Delina [in another novel] earned money by doing needlework: "She tried hard to keep herself a stranger to her poor old father's slight income by the use of the finest production of steel, whose blunt edge eyed the reely covering with marked greed, and offered its sharp dart to faultless fabrics of flaxen fineness."

Something to behold.