I’ve been wondering about this. Colleen Hoover is well known as the sort of poster girl for sloppily written, baffling and aggressively mediocre books.
What was the equivalent to her in previous times? Like the Romantic or Modernist period?
During the the 1890s, what book was considered “embarassing” or super low brow to be caught with (in the same way the book community largely treats It Ends With Us)?
This posted reminded me of an article I once read and thankfully I found it! Apparently it’s Irene Iddesleigh by Amanda McKittruck Ros. But the article also mentions Judith Krantz’s Dazzle which also seems to be a solid candidate.
I’m also reminded of The British Critic’s review of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein:
Which is to say many of the “worst novel ever” nominations seem to have one suspicious thing in common and it might be wise to take these superlatives with a massive grain of misogyny salt.
I didn’t see your post, before I put my own about her. She got her own back on Pain one of her critics, in her 20 page foreword to Delina Delaney.
In Ros’ last novel, Helen Huddleson, all the characters are named after various fruits: Lord Raspberry, Cherry Raspberry, Sir Peter Plum, Christopher Currant, the Earl of Grape, Madame Pear. Of Pear, Ros wrote: “she had a swell staff of sweet-faced helpers swathed in stratagem, whose members and garments glowed with the lust of the loose, sparkled with the tears of the tortured, shone with the sunlight of bribery, dangled with the diamonds of distrust, slashed with sapphires of scandals…”[6]
After reading that, I wouldn’t go too heavy on the misogyny salt angle. But that’s just me.