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]
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.