Robertson Davies Books in Order

An amateur production of Shakespeare's The Tempest stirs up love, vanity, jealousy, and chaos in Salterton. Davies uses rehearsal-room drama to skewer ambition and self-deception with a light, amused touch.

A false engagement notice planted in the local paper throws Salterton into confusion. What begins as a joke grows into a comedy of gossip, wounded pride, and small-town consequences.

Chosen by chance and charity, Monica Gall is sent from small-town Ontario to Europe to study music. Her education becomes a sharp, funny coming-of-age story about class, talent, and the making of an artist.

Davies writes about reading with relish, impatience, and strong opinions. These essays ask what good reading really is, what culture asks of readers, and why books still matter.

Written for school performance, this brisk masque sets the old anarchic spirit of Mr. Punch against modern theatrical fashions and cultural fussiness. It is playful satire, light on its feet and fond of argument.

A boyhood snowball in Deptford alters several lives, especially Dunstan Ramsay's. Looking back over war, sainthood, guilt, and wonder, he tries to understand the strange part he has played in other people's stories.

Davies offers a compact portrait of Stephen Leacock, tracing the humorist's career, comic style, and place in Canadian letters. It is part literary study, part appreciative conversation between two witty public writers.

After his father's death, David Staunton travels to Switzerland and begins Jungian analysis. The novel turns inward, following his struggle with family myth, guilt, and the damaged inheritance left by Boy Staunton.

Magnus Eisengrim, once Paul Dempster of Deptford, tells the story of his stolen childhood and his rise as a master magician. His account brings the Deptford books to a dark, theatrical finish.

Speeches, lectures, and occasional pieces show Davies thinking out loud about books, universities, evil, theatre, and public life. It is conversational, digressive, and often most interesting when he turns unexpectedly serious.

Reviews, essays, profiles, and occasional pieces show what Davies cared about as a critic and reader. Books lead the way, but the collection also reveals his taste for character, argument, and civilized mischief.

After collector Francis Cornish dies, a tangled will pulls professors, a priest, a graduate student, and an heir into a world of manuscripts, paintings, desire, and suspicion. Davies turns campus life into a witty, high-stakes comedy of intellect and appetite.

This essay collection gathers Davies on theatre and literary life in Canada. He writes as a seasoned reviewer and man of the stage, mixing argument, anecdote, and impatience with cant.

These eighteen ghost stories began as Christmas entertainments at Massey College. They mix the supernatural with academic vanity, social comedy, and the pleasure of a well-timed chill.

In these Alexander Lectures, Davies looks at nineteenth-century melodrama and the theatre's power to turn feeling into spectacle. It is short, sharp criticism, full of stage knowledge and delight in performance.

Davies's alter ego Samuel Marchbanks grumbles, jokes, and wanders across politics, manners, weather, books, and daily annoyances. This omnibus gathers the best of the columns and shows how funny Davies could be on the page.

This novel circles back to the life of Francis Cornish, the dead collector whose will drives The Rebel Angels. Following him from hidden childhood truths to art, forgery, and espionage, Davies builds a rich portrait of talent shaped by secrecy.

The Cornish Foundation backs a completion of E.T.A. Hoffmann's unfinished opera, and the project draws artists, scholars, and schemers into fresh trouble. It is a comic, crowded novel about music, desire, and old secrets refusing to stay buried.

This volume pairs two early plays. One follows gifted women in Upper Canada during the Rebellion of 1837, the other pits rural habit against hunger for art and a fuller life.

Murdered in the opening pages, Connor Gilmartin finds himself stuck in an afterlife film festival beside his killer. As he watches the lives of his ancestors unfold, Davies turns family history into a ghostly, slyly comic meditation on fate.

Two early plays show Davies testing ideas he would keep returning to. One looks at art, scholarship, and cultural compromise, while the other turns a young man's breakfast into a comic battle among the forces inside him.

This pair of plays moves from Ottawa satire to newspaper farce. One follows a civil servant's royal connection, the other shows how a letter to the editor can set off comic trouble.

When a priest dies mysteriously at the altar on Good Friday, Toronto doctor Jonathan Hullah starts looking backward as much as forward. The result is a funny, searching novel about medicine, faith, friendship, and hidden motives.

Davies gathers classic supernatural tales with the knowing pleasure of a lifelong ghost-story lover. It is an invitation to read the eerie tradition he cared about so much, from subtle hauntings to sharper shocks.

This posthumous collection brings together essays and lectures on reading, writing, painting, aging, and the life of books. It is wide-ranging, thoughtful, and a good entry into Davies outside the novels.

These later letters catch Davies in his final decades, writing about the Cornish books, public life, friendships, and the work still ahead of him. They are candid, clever, and full of literary gossip and self-scrutiny.

A posthumous gathering of essays, speeches, and reviews centered on theatre, opera, and music. Davies ranges widely, but the pleasure comes from his lively mind and his feeling for performance.

This first volume of Davies's letters follows him from Oxford and the Old Vic through newspapers, teaching, and the rise of his fiction. It shows a younger writer becoming the sharp, funny public voice readers know.

This selection gathers Davies on craft, imagination, theatre, criticism, and the daily work of being a writer. It is a strong sampler of his nonfiction mind, curious, exacting, and funny.

Here Davies writes as an ideal companion for serious readers. The essays roam through books, taste, rereading, and literary companionship, always making reading feel like an active and joyful art.

These diary selections from 1959 to 1963 catch Davies in middle life as journalist, public figure, and novelist-in-the-making. They show ambition, self-doubt, sharp observation, and the long road toward Fifth Business.