Passages from the writings of Amanda McKittrick Ros (1860-1939), widely considered the worst novelist of all time:

• Heavily laden with the garb of disappointment did the wandering woman of wayward wrong retrace her footsteps from the door for ever, and leisurely walked down the artistic avenue of carpeted care, never more to face the furrowed frowns of friends who, in years gone by, bestowed on her the praises of poetic powers.
• Rising to her feet, and tossing her haughty head as high as she reasonably could without pain, she commenced to pace the floor in deepest agony.
• That she whom he stole from the straight and narrow path upon which she unquestionably trod was not about to walk on the crooked and broad road of destruction, driven thither by his daring desire to stab the life of his chum, Maurice Munro, with the steel of distrust in order to gratify his licentiousness by the purity of his stolen, enforced prey distressed him even to the edge of distraction.
• “I, as you see, am tinged with slightly snowy tufts, the result of stifled sorrow and care concerning you alone; and on the memorable day of our alliance, as you are well aware, the black and glossy locks of glistening glory crowned my brow.”
• Father Guerdo’s face darkened somewhat, his thin lips parted, exposing two rows of irregularly-set yellow-usefuls, while he drew down his brow, instantly impressing her by the fact that he felt displeased.
• But President O’Sullivan, whose well-guided words and fatherly advice had on this evening so sealed the mind of forgiveness with the wax of disinterested intent that Sir John, on his arrival home, at once sent for his solicitors, Messrs. Hutchinson & Harper, and ordering his will to be produced, demanded there and then that the pen of persuasion be dipped into the ink of revenge and spread thickly along the paragraph of blood-related charity to blank the intolerable words that referred to the woman he was now convinced, beyond doubt, had braved the bridge of bigamy.
• On arriving at his destination, he instructed the man to await his return. Then ascending excitedly step by step until reaching the beautifully-kept grounds surrounding his iniquitous wing of Hades during days he now damned he had tracked so often, desirous to expel from the region of his remembrance the thoughts that thrashed his weary brain with the lash of lewdness, concealing himself behind a fat chestnut tree that rose in overgrown majesty within the grounds, he resolved to rest within its massive trunk for a short time until his anger subsided somewhat.

Here’s a full novel. “She cannot be altogether laughed off,” wrote Anthony Powell. “She may be a long way from Shakespeare, but she partakes, in however infinitely minute a degree, of the Shakespearean power over language.” Ros herself had written, “I expect I will be talked about at the end of 1000 years.” She may have been right.

I never deliberately sat down and ‘created’ a character in my life. I begin to write incidents out of real life. One of the persons I write about begins to talk this way and one another, and pretty soon I find that these creatures of the imagination have developed into characters, and have for me a distinct personality. These are not ‘made,’ they just grow naturally out of the subject. That was the way Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and other characters came to exist. I couldn’t to save my life deliberately sit down and plan out a character according to diagram. In fact, every book I ever wrote just wrote itself. I am really too lazy to sit down and plan and fret to ‘create’ a ‘character.’ If anybody wants any character ‘creating,’ he will have to go somewhere else for it. I’m not in the market for that. It’s too much like industry.

— “Mark Twain Tells the Secrets of Novelists,” New York American, May 26, 1907

When she was 15 years old, Jane Austen wrote a history of England:

Henry the 4th ascended the throne of England much to his own satisfaction in the year 1399, after having prevailed on his cousin and predecessor Richard the 2nd, to resign it to him, and to retire for the rest of his life to Pomfret Castle, where he happened to be murdered. It is to be supposed that Henry was married since he had certainly four sons, but it is not in my power to inform the Reader who was his wife. Be this as it may, he did not live for ever, but falling ill, his son the Prince of Wales came and took away the crown; whereupon the King made a long speech, for which I must refer the Reader to Shakespear’s Plays, and the Prince made a still longer. Things being thus settled between them the King died, and was succeeded by his son Henry who had previously beat Sir William Gascoigne.

She signed herself “a partial, prejudiced, & ignorant Historian.” “There is … in considering even her crudest early experiments, the interest of looking at a mind and not at a mirror,” observed G.K. Chesterton. “She may not be conscious of being herself; but she is not, like so many more cultivated imitators, conscious of being somebody else.”

Ronald Knox reviews Gertrude Stein in the Dublin Review, 1927:

There is oddly not nearly so much difficulty about reading the beginning of a book by Gertrude Stein like this book of hers called Composition as Explanation (Hogarth Essays) as there is in reading it later on when it gets nearer the end. It is all written like this with no punctuation of course but it does sound as if it meant something. Every now and then a word or two is written twice over twice over but of course that may be the printer. It is a little confusing to be told that people are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living, but probably it all works out somehow. She goes on like this for about thirty pages and then she says now that is all. But it isn’t it isn’t it isn’t. It’s only about half. She starts putting in headlines after that to symbolically no doubt make her meaning clearer, but it isn’t clearer. It is ever so much not clearer. SITWELL EDITH SITWELL.

She says that quite suddenly in capitals as if it were a line of Onward Christian Soldiers. And in this part of the book all the parts of speech get mixed up anyhow as if she had been taking a lesson in typewriting. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog lazy dog lazy fox the quick jumps jumps brown. There is only one sentence in this part which is English, it says toasted susie is my ice-cream, and that is not sense, is it? So awfully not sense. I suppose she must either think it looks pretty or think it sounds pretty when you read it but it doesn’t it doesn’t either it really doesn’t.

“At dinner I sat next to James Branch Cabell who asked me, Is Gertrude Stein serious?” remembered Alice B. Toklas. “Desperately, I replied. That puts a different light on it, he said. For you, I said, not for me.”

Late in life Arthur Conan Doyle pursued an interest in the possibility of spiritualism and existence beyond the grave. He was widely criticized for this, but a writer to the Graphic raised a redeeming point:

Although we may misbelieve mediums and
With doubt and suspicion our minds may be filled,
Sherlock Holmes, we must grant, reappeared in the Strand
A number of times after having been killed.

Indeed, Holmes had returned against his creator’s wishes. “I never thought they would take it so much to heart,” Conan Doyle once wrote of Holmes’ death. “I got letters from all over the world reproaching me on the subject. One, I remember, from a lady whom I did not know, began ‘You beast’.”

Edward Lear once overheard a gentleman in a railway station saying that his children had been reading the Book of Nonsense. He maintained that Edward Lear did not exist, and said that Lord Derby had written the book.

Says I, joining spontaneous in the conversation — ‘That is quite a mistake: I have reason to know that Edward Lear the painter and author wrote and illustrated the whole book.’ ‘And I,’ says the Gentleman, says he, — ‘have good reason to know, Sir, that you are wholly mistaken. There is no such person as Edward Lear.’ ‘But,’ says I, ‘there is — and I am the man — I wrote the book!’ Whereupon all the party burst out laughing and evidently thought me mad or telling fibs. So I took off my hat and showed it, with Edward Lear and the address in large letters — also one of my cards, and a marked handkerchief: on which amazement devoured those benighted individuals and I left them to gnash their teeth in trouble and tumult.

Related: In October 1812, Trinity and St. John’s Colleges, Cambridge, ordered that students appearing in hall or chapel in pantaloons or trousers should be considered absent.

Visitors to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London can see a plaque commemorating the location in which John Watson first met Sherlock Holmes. The occasion of Holmes and Watson’s meeting there led Tokyo’s Sherlock Holmes Appreciation Society to contribute £650 to the “Save Bart’s Campaign” in 2006.

Holmes is astir elsewhere as well. A passage in T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral runs:

THOMAS: Who shall have it?
TEMPTER: He who will come.
THOMAS: What shall be the month?
TEMPTER: The last from the first.
THOMAS: What shall we give for it?
TEMPTER: Pretence of priestly power.
THOMAS: Why should we give it?
TEMPTER: For the power and the glory.
THOMAS: No!

A writer to John O’ London’s Weekly in August 1937 noted that this is strikingly similar to a passage in “The Musgrave Ritual”:

“Whose was it?”
“His who is gone.”
“Who shall have it?”
“He who will come.”
“Where was the sun?”
“Over the oak.”
“Where was the shadow?”
“Under the elm.”
“How was it stepped?”
“North by ten and by ten, east by five and by five, south by two and by two, west by one and by one, and so under.”
“What shall we give for it?”
“All that is ours.”
“Why should we give it?”
“For the sake of the trust.”

The writer asked, “Can you tell me what the connection is between the two?”

The editors replied: “We are informed that Mr. Eliot makes no secret of the fact that occasionally in order to obtain a special effect certain passages from his works are taken from the writings of other authors, and that the passage in question was actually adapted by him from the Conan Doyle story.”

Conan Doyle himself paid a similar compliment at the end of Holmes’ career. At the conclusion of “The Final Problem,” Watson calls his friend “the best and the wisest man whom I have ever known.” A writer to the Times, March 5, 1941, points out that Plato says the same of Socrates at the end of the Phaedo: “Such was the end, Echecrates, of our friend; concerning whom I may truly say, that of all the men of his time whom I have known, he was the wisest and justest and best.”

Robert Browning spent seven years composing Sordello, a 40,000-word narrative poem about strife between Guelphs and Ghibellines in 13th-century Italy. It was not received well.

Tennyson said, “There were only two lines in it that I understood, and they were both lies: ‘Who will may hear Sordello’s story told’ and ‘Who would has heard Sordello’s story told.'”

Thomas Carlyle wrote, “My wife has read through ‘Sordello’ without being able to make out whether ‘Sordello’ was a man, or a city, or a book.”

Douglas Jerrold opened the book while convalescing from an illness and began to fear that his mind had been destroyed. “O God, I AM an idiot!” he cried, sinking back onto the sofa. He pressed the book on his wife and sister; when Mrs. Jerrold said, “I don’t understand what this man means; it is gibberish,” her husband exclaimed, “Thank God, I am NOT an idiot!”

In Walter Besant’s 1895 novel The Golden Butterfly, one character spends eight hours trying to penetrate Browning’s poetry. “His eyes were bloodshot, his hair was pushed in disorder about his head, his cheeks were flushed, his hands were trembling, the nerves in his face were twitching. He looked about him wildly, and tried to collect his faculties. Then he arose, and solemnly cursed Robert Browning. He cursed him eating, drinking, and sleeping. And then he took all his volumes, and disposing them carefully in the fireplace, set light to them. ‘I wish,’ he said, ‘that I could put the poet there too.'”

Another (apocryphal) story tells of a puzzled friend who asked Browning the meaning of one of his poems. “When I wrote it, only God and I knew,” the poet replied. “Now, God alone knows!”