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)?
Amanda McKitrick Ros https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_McKittrick_Ros
She published her first novel Irene Iddesleigh at her own expense in 1897. She wrote poetry and a number of novels. Her works were not read widely, and her eccentric, over-written, “purple” circumlocutory writing is alleged by some critics to be some of the worst prose and poetry ever written.
Her “admirers” included Aldous Huxley, Siegfried Sassoon, C. S. Lewis and Mark Twain.[7] Her novel Irene Iddesleigh was published in 1897.[8] Twain considered Irene “one of the greatest unintentionally humorous novels of all time”. A reader sent a copy of Irene to humorist Barry Pain, who in an 1898 review called it “a thing that happens once in a million years”, and sarcastically termed it “the book of the century”. He reported that he was initially entertained, but soon “shrank before it in tears and terror”. Ros retorted by branding Pain a “clay crab of corruption”[citation needed] and wrote a twenty-page preface to her second novel, Delina Delaney, in which she disparaged Pain at length and suggested that he was so hostile only because he was secretly in love with her.[9]