Her husband financed the publication of Irene Iddesleigh as a gift to Ros on their tenth wedding anniversary, thus launching her literary career.
[1] Ros died at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast on 2 February 1939,[1] under the name "Hannah Margaret Rodgers".
"[5] She imagined "the million and one who thirst for aught that drops from my pen", and predicted that she would "be talked about at the end of a thousand years.
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".
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] Ros wrote that her critics lacked sufficient intellect to appreciate her talent, and that they conspired against her for revealing the corruption of society's ruling classes, thereby disturbing "the bowels of millions".
[6] In Mrs Ros we see, as we see in the Elizabethan novelists, the result of the discovery of art by an unsophisticated mind and of its first conscious attempt to produce the artistic...
Alert and quick witted people accept her at once: those she leaves entirely unmoved are invariably dull and unimaginative".
[6] In a 2024 op-ed for The Washington Post, comedian Andrew Doyle argued that Ros "knew exactly what she was doing" and that most of her works were written to be intentionally humorous.
While he writes that he has "little doubt that her first novel was published in earnest," Doyle points out that Ros's most-mocked tendencies expanded and escalated over time, and compares her to an internet troll in terms of humor.
[citation needed] The Frank Ferguson-edited collection Ulster-Scots Writing: An Anthology (Four Courts, 2008) includes her poem "The Town of Tare".
[citation needed] On 11 November 2006 as part of a 50-year celebration, librarian Elspeth Legg hosted a major retrospective of her works, culminating in a public reading by 65 delegates of the entire contents of Fumes of Formation.
The collection of first editions covers all her major works including volumes of her poetry, Fumes of Formation and Poems of Puncture, together with lesser known pieces such as Kaiser Bill and Donald Dudley: The Bastard Critic.
[6] The Oxford literary group the Inklings, which included C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, held competitions to see who could read Ros' work aloud for the longest time without laughing.