It's startling how thoughtful, evocative and just plain funny a man can be in writing his regular correspondance. Makes you want to be a prolific letter-writer yourself. Makes you wish he were still alive so that you could respond to some of the more inflammatory things he says.

I don't think I'd realized quite how much Davies was concerned about the "place" of Canadian Literature in the world literature canon; it comes out so plainly here.

Judith Skelton Grant, who edited the letters, is mentioned repeatedly in them -- Davies apparently was amused, worried and sometimes just ticked off about the biography she was writing of him.

I enjoyed this book's organization, which was established by the various books Davies had written over the last part of his career. While not Canadian, and thereby somewhat in the dark regarding some of the letters' recipients, I found the editor's annotations brief but helpful. The main draw here is the author's distinctive voice, which emerges within the various letters.

I am not usually interested in reading compilations of letters. Here, however, I find a volume that constitutes a diversion from my other reading, a book which I can pick up from time to time and garner ideas for those brighter days when I re-read a Davies' novel. For this end, I found the collection worthwhile!

For people who have loved reading Robertson Davies' books, this is an interesting and enlightening compendium of interviews with one of Canada's foremost men of letters. The reading itself is a little tedious at times (though Davies is always lively) and if you haven't read any of Davies' other books, don't start with this one.

Stephen Leacock is one of my favorite humorists - perhaps somewhat obscure these days, but as sharp and as witty as ever. Think of him as a precursor to Garison Keillor and you can't go too far wrong. This book is slender, too slender for my tastes, and I do not regard it as a feast, more like a selection of hors d'oeuvres. The introduction by Robertson Davies is not, as one might expect, a fawning admiration of Leacock, but serves him up, warts and all, on a platter. Positive but with qualifications.

The selections are very good, though I can think of some pieces I would have preferred, it must have been a very difficult task to limit the Leacock to just these fifteen. And they are gems, each one. I thought I might quote a little here and there, but found myself unable to stop - all the review would be selections from the selections. Do yourself a favour and buy a copy if you like Leacock. Davies' introduction is worth the price alone, and the selections are a bonus, and you may then read all of the pieces I would have included in their entirety.

If you don't know of Stephen Leacock, run, do not walk, to the 1-click button and give it a click. You'll be glad you did!

This book comprises the three Alexander lectures that Robertson Davies gave at the University of Toronto in 1982. He explores the evolution of nineteenth-century English-speaking society's view of itself, as reflected in the popular theatre of the time. While these lectures are not a scholarly history of melodrama, synopses and descriptions of some of the most popular nineteenth-century plays in English provide much of his material. So if your literature and theatre courses were like the ones I took, where English drama disappeared between the Restoration comedies and George Bernard Shaw, this book will begin to fill in the blank.

Davies is the first to admit that these plays are not great literature. He draws upon his practical experience in the theatre, his sense of the Romantic movement, and his appreciation for the psychological insights of Freud and Jung, to show how these plays gave nineteenth-century audiences a mirror that was "true to life as they [knew] it". The first lecture gives a general overview of melodrama as "oblivion's balm". In the second lecture, Davies uses archetypal concepts to interpret the limitations imposed upon female characters in melodrama. The final lecture deals with characters who have guilty secrets, a characteristic that Davies believes many of the audience members must have shared. Since part of Davies' theme is the evolution of the Nature that the theatre was reflecting, the close of this lecture discusses the genius of Ibsen in dealing with characters' secrets in a much more complex and illuminating way than in the melodrama that preceded it.

I found the book quite interesting, because I admire Davies' ability to draw upon eclectic sources to illuminate human Nature, both in his novels and in his nonfiction. While I do not expect to energetically pursue the study of Victorian melodrama after this, I now have a much greater sense of why it mattered. For those readers who would like to learn more about the subject, the book includes some illustrations and a bibliographical note pointing to scholarship on the nineteenth-century theatre, as well as some collections of memoirs and anecdotes "of varying dependability."

This is a great primer for anyone interested in the life and work of Canadian author Robertson Davies. It is extremely brief, however, and merely scratches the surface. This isn't a detailed, original work of criticism, but a summary of the man, his writings, and critical reactions to his work.

In my opinion he should have kept The Salterton Trilogy in Salterton. The characters in Europe where too real. I enjoyed the caricaturish Salterton characters much better. This book does seem to have a bit more of a plot than the first two but I'm not sure Davies is that worried about plot in his books. Guess I'll have to read the other two trilogies to find out.

To my taste, with this book Davies hit the big time. It's a wonderful story of a developing artist, instantly familiar to anyone who has been involved with the performing arts. Add to that the fact that Davies begins to really hit his stride in developing his mature style, with offbeat but recognizable characters, a plot that drives forward without ever seeming to rush, and his real appreciation for artists and students, and you have a real winner.

this was a christmas gift several years ago and while I ADORE everything that Davies wrote (esp Rebel Angels), this was a fawning, name-dropping, dull, pendatic read. Davies, I believe, was still living when it was written, and he cooperated in the writing of it, so there is no critical look at him, his life or really any aspect of his writing.

I look forward to a new biography that doesn't treat Davies as a sacred cow. I grew up in the same area where davies was a newspaper editor and theatre guy and his put-on english accent and snobbiness didn't impress the people of my grandmother's generation.

Still, I appreciate his writing, but wished this was a truer portrait of him, warts and all. I found it a drudge to go through

Judith Skelton Grant has done an absolutely outstanding job of giving us everything we wanted to know about Robertson Davies: his background and roots in small town Ontario, his three careers (acting, journalism, academia), critiques and illuminating discussions of his plays, novels, and occasional writings, his beliefs and philosophies, and so on. I could not put this book down; read the first 500 pages in two sittings and finished it on the third. Let's hope that she brings out an updated version to take the story up to Davies' death; as it is, there is no discussion here of his fine last novel, The Cunning Man. END

After reading "The Rebel Angels" and "What's Bred in the Bone", two five star novels, I expected to thoroughly enjoy the last segment of the trilogy. Well, the only reason I made it through the novel was that I wanted to say that I read the entire trilogy. The book completely changes in tone from the first two. Professors I respected in the first books are buffoons in this one. There are an untold number of quotations from opera librettos, medieval poems, etc. that were not relevant to me at all. One of the characters is incapable of appearing without making multiple references to Wales, Welsh literature and history. This would not have been a problem except that this is one of the main characters. The whole gypsy theme, which was so fascinating in the rebel angels gets overwhelmed by the Welshness.

In sum, it turned its back on wonderful characters, made obscure references to poems I never read, focused too much on opera and changed in tone from the first two books in a rather dissappointing way. Alas.

The Lyre of Orpheus continues the story of the characters introduced in The Rebel Angels -- Maria and Arthur Cornish, Simon Darcourt, Clement Hollier, etc. I read the Cornish Trilogy straight through, and while I very much enjoyed it, I thought Davies ran out of gas somewhere in the Lyre of Orpheus. What I liked so much about the first two books was Davies' delving into the personalities of the characters; What's Bred in the Bone deals more with Francis Cornish, but goes very deeply into the forces that shaped his life. Davies has great insight into human nature. In The Lyre of Orpheus, the characters' motivations are not well explored. For example, we learn that a character's wife has an affair that results in pregnancy, and that the man, with apparently little ado, not only forgives his wife and treats her with undiminished devotion, but also continues to regard her lover as the dear friend he had been. Well, that's great, but uncommon, and Davies makes no attempt to explain this astounding level of generosity other than to analogize it to the Arthurian legend (but that was a legend). Similarly, we learn that Simon Darcourt has taken something of a new path in his life, but for motivation we are told little more than that, after taking a walk in woods, he has decided to view his life differently. Instead of helping us to relate to these characters, Davies spends a great deal of time educating us about how to produce an opera, evidently a great love of his. Opera fans will find this great fun, but it doesn't make for a great story. Finally, the analogizing to Arthurian legend of the characters' lives that permeates the entire work as a leitmotif becomes increasingly heavyhanded as time wears on, almost to the point of self-parody. In short, it's an entertaining read, but not up to the level of the first two parts of the trilogy.

In The Rebel Angels, Maria's character, provided in a first-person narrative, was so complex and interesting that I'd have been happy with a "Theotoky Trilogy"! Maria's friendship with Darcourt was well drawn and bittersweet. Perhaps a fourth of the way through Lyre, the third person omniscient narration no longer records Maria's thoughts, and Darcourt's journey of self-discovery really gets underway within the context of his Cornish text and the stories of the Hoffman opera and Maria's and Arthur's crisis. Thus, echoing "Henry's" review of this novel, I was disappointed that Maria's own journey remains "under a cloud" (as Darcourt put it), and the novel never really develops her character except as an unintended Guenevere and her final promise to "keep on trying." I'd have liked less rumination on the "magnanimous cuckold" theme--which seems strained after a while and never really reaches as deeply as possible into the pain of the Cornishes' crisis--and more development of Arthur's complex personality, perhaps Maria's research with the Portfolio (a story line pretty much dropped in Lyre), and other themes. Having said all this, however, I greatly enjoyed this novel, and the troublesome course toward the premiere of Hoffman's opera and the publication of Darcourt's life of Francis Cornish made for an erudite and pleasurable story. Davies' novels always provide a richer world than one finds in many stories, and it's a tribute to his gifts that he mixed so many rich worlds in this trilogy.