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The Cornish Trilogy is the name given to three related novels by Canadian novelist, playwright, critic, journalist, and professor Robertson Davies.
The trilogy consists of The Rebel Angels (1981), What's Bred in the Bone (1985), and The Lyre of Orpheus (1988). The series explores the life and influence of Francis Cornish.
The Rebel Angels
The story of The Rebel Angels is set in motion by the death of eccentric art patron and collector Francis Cornish. University professors Clement Hollier, Urquhart McVarish, and Simon Darcourt are the executors of Cornish's complicated will, which includes material that Hollier wants for his studies. The deceased's nephew Arthur Cornish, who stands to inherit the fortune, is also a character.
What's Bred in the Bone
What's Bred in the Bone is the life story of Francis Cornish, whose death and will were the subject of The Rebel Angels. His was a full life, and we follow him from his childhood as a wealthy and precocious misfit in a small Ontario town, his education in Toronto (in which we meet Dunstan Ramsay from the Deptford Trilogy) and Oxford, his unusual apprenticeship as a restorer and painter in Nazi Germany, his wartime experiences in England, and his later career as a collector and a patron of the arts in Toronto.
What's Bred in the Bone was shortlisted for the 1986 Booker Prize.
The Lyre of Orpheus
In The Lyre of Orpheus Simon Darcourt, Arthur Cornish, and Maria Cornish find themselves at the head of the "Cornish Foundation" and are called upon to decide what projects deserve funding. In the end, it is decided that an opera by E.T.A. Hoffmann will be staged at Stratford, Ontario, Ontario.
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