Amanda McKittrick Ros was born in Drumaness, near Ballynahinch, County Down. She was educated at Drumaness School, where her father was Principal, and Marlborough Teacher Training College in Dublin. She was appointed monitor at Millbrook National School, Larne, before completing her training in Dublin. She married Andy Ros, who was stationmaster in Larne. She wrote many novels in her own inimitable, idiosyncratic fashion, among which are Irene Iddesleigh; Delina Delaney and Helen Huddleson, the latter completed by her biographer, Jack Loudan, after her death. She referred to her critics as the 'maggoty throng', 'claycrabs of corruption' and 'hogwashing hooligans'. She was greatly admired by Mark Twain and Aldous Huxley, and there was an Amanda Ros fan club at St John's College, Cambridge. She also published collections of verse entitled Poems of Puncture and Fumes of Fomentation. At the age of sixty-two, after her first husband had died, she re-married a farmer. She also wrote music, songs, and, during the First World War, she wrote ballads under the pseudonym Monica Moyland, which were printed in broadsheets. She saw her own death as joining 'the boundless battalion of the breathless'. [O Rare Amanda: The Life of Amanda McKittrick Ros, Jack Loudan, 1954]

Born:	8 December 1860
Died:	2 February 1939