Product Description
Drawing on interviews with the Canadian novelist himself and an unprecedented access to his notebooks and family papers, a detailed biography traces the evolution of Davies's work and the relationship between his life and his fiction. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Canada's greatest Jungian
The biographer's reverence for her subject is restrained but evident.If there was a dark side to this great old man of Canadian letters, hardly a shadow of it is to be found here.The figure who emerges from this book is a small-town boy -almost a backwoods boy - whose imagination flourished in the unbearable stuffiness of early twentieth-century Ontario. Davies' greatest private enthusiasm seemed to be his repeated trips to the U.K.He did a less-than-outstanding Oxford BA, and fell in love with the place, there meeting an Australian who became his wife.

Fans of Davies' eleven novels will find ample links between the life and the works; they will also learn much about his unremitting early attempts to become known as a playwright, a genre in which he made less much of a mark than with his novels and his journalism (the latter effort highlighted by his 1950s and 60s stint as editor of The Peterborough Examiner).

Davies' role in the early 1950s startup of the Stratford Festival is an accomplishment not to be overlooked; for that alone, he would merit top ranking in the annals of Canadian Shakespeariana. If the Bard was Davies' first intellectual love, Carl Jung would likely be the second.My favourite passage in the 700-plus pages of this splendid biography is on 461-62, where Davies is quoted at some length on how Jung viewed the "second half" of life - the 40-plus years - as the truly magic time of existence.A second memorable passage comes at pages 484-85, where the author (for once, with immodesty, but here deserved), reveals how she asked Davies to see his preparatory notes for THE CORNISH TRILOGY.Davies politely refused the request in a letter which might be seen as his essential statement on the art of fiction.Here is its key sentence: "The imagination is a cauldron, not a filing cabinet."We should all paste these words on the top edge of our computer monitors.

Fawning portait of still living (when written) author
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 waswritten, and he cooperated in the writing of it, so there is no criticallook at him, his life or really any aspect of his writing.

I look forwardto a new biography that doesn't treat Davies as a sacred cow. I grew up inthe same area where davies was a newspaper editor and theatre guy and hisput-on english accent and snobbiness didn't impress the people of mygrandmother's generation.

Still, I appreciate his writing, but wishedthis was a truer portrait of him, warts and all. I found it a drudge to gothrough

Outstanding biography of a Canadian "icon"
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 ... Read more

Product Description
Why does the gnostic Sophia appear so suddenly and gloriously in The Rebel Angels? Why is the portrait of the morphine-addicted pedophile in World of Wonders so convincing and chilling? From what source springs a notion of malice so deep that it presents a mother reaching beyond the grave to lay "the dead hand" on her dutiful son in A Mixture of Frailties? What accounts for the many happy outcomes in the novels of a man who portrays evil so uncompromisingly and unrelentingly? The answer to these questions lies in the unorthodox religious vision of Robertson Davies.

All of Davies's novels are redolent with ingeniously used biblical references and quotations. Catching the Wind in a Net traces the evolution of Davies's religious views and their influence on his novels. Dave Little's study examines Davies's provocative and sometimes conflicting notions of a supreme being. This book places Davies's frequent calls for self-exploration and self-discovery within a theological framework, and since we live in an age in which, according to Davies, "the biblical culture scarcely exists," Catching the Wind in a Net includes a useful appendix that identifies the biblical quotations and allusions present in his novels. ... Read more

Product Description
Completing the survey begun in Lams Cornish Trilogy volume, Aspects of Robertson Davies Novels discusses the Salterton and Deptford trilogies along with Davies last two novels, Murther & Walking Spirits and The Cunning Man. The apprentice effort Tempest-Tost and the journeymans success Leaven of Malice were followed by Davies first genuinely fine novel, A Mixture of Frailties, the story of a talented Salterton girl who becomes a world-famous soprano.The Deptford trilogy is discussed in terms of Northrop Fryes confession form as it appears in Fifth Business, and in variations of that form in The Manticore and World of Wonders.Although Davies Jungian enthusiasms produced certain flaws to which readers have objected, Murther & Walking Spirits is by no means a failure; it is best understood as an implicit spiritual history of Canada which is adumbrated in the generational experience of a single Canadian family. The Cunning Man concludes Davies career with a narrative as rewardingly complex as any of the Cornish trilogy novels. ... Read more