Silk by Cynthia Medenham

Thanks for both images to Jane Austen’s World 

Title: Silk

Author: Cynthia Medenham 

Publisher: not known but possibly Tom Reynolds

Source book: Urn Burial by Kerry Greenwood 

The Hon. Miss Phryne Fisher gives up trying to read Silk by Miss Cynthia Medenham after only three chapters. Miss Medenham writes symbolic, impenetrable prose, which if it wasn’t so hard to understand would probably be banned. Phryne tells us that despite this, the books sell well. I expect that’ll be down to the woman who is a reincarnation of an eighteenth-century courtesan, the tiger skin, and the virgin (but virile) boy, all of which feature in Silk. I’m guessing that’s what Phryne deduced too.

Phryne encounters Miss Medenham in the library of publisher Tom Reynolds’s country house; she is reading Midnight of the Sheik by Eunice Henderson (see Murder on the Ballarat Train): it’s utter tosh.

Miss Medenham’s most recent offering is Earth. Phryne wonders whether she should admit that she stuck fast after only three pages of dense prose. But she had already decided that the bandit-lover was remarkable clean and well-educated for a Spanish peasant (no offence to Spanish peasants, obviously), resembling rather an Oxford gentleman with picturesque trappings. In Phryne’s view, Earth is a book which cries out to be left behind the sofa whence it has fallen from the reader’s nerveless hand.

Miss Medenham reckons she has been channeling Emily Brontë: ‘Didn’t you notice the fire and passion of my last novel, the depth, the wind blowing through it?’ Obviously Phryne lies and says yes.