Novel: The Rebel Angels

Overview
Robertson Davies' The Rebel Angels opens with the death of Francis Cornish, an irascible, eccentric art collector whose estate and quirky will become the catalyst for a brilliant academic comedy of manners. The novel follows a circle of scholars and seekers drawn to Cornish's bequest: ambitious academics, an art historian, a genteel professor, and an alluring younger woman whose presence stirs rivalries and desire. The plot moves between college corridors, private studies, and private intrigues as intellectual life collides with personal passions.
Davies balances comic rivalry with a serious appetite for ideas. The narrative folds erudition into satire, letting debates about manuscripts, paintings, and the provenance of objects illuminate characters' temperaments and moral choices. As the inheritance reshuffles lives and loyalties, the university setting becomes a stage for questions about taste, authority, and the uses of knowledge.

Main characters and plot arc
At the center stands Cornish's legacy: books, pictures and a modest fortune that prompt claimants and confidants to reassess their ambitions. The academic recipients and hopeful beneficiaries bring different visions of scholarship into conflict. Rivalries over tenure, reputations and romantic attachments intensify as secrets and longings surface. A younger scholar's intellectual gifts and sensual appeal unsettle established professors, while an art historian's fussy devotion to connoisseurship reveals the thin line between reverence and possession.
Parallel to the legal and academic maneuverings, a strand of mysticism and folklore threads through the story. Occult interests and obscure manuscripts enter conversations about interpretation and meaning, suggesting that scholarship itself can border on devotion. Through a sequence of revelations, confessions and comic missteps, friendships are tested and alliances shift, leading characters to new self-understandings and altered futures.

Themes and tone
The Rebel Angels explores the tensions between learning and life, showing how intellectual pride can mask personal insecurity and how love, lust and vanity undercut cool reason. Art and books function as both symbols and pawns: objects of admiration, currency in social maneuvering, and repositories of identity. Davies probes how scholars cultivate authority through taste and how institutions codify that authority in ways that can exclude or absurdly ennoble.
Tone oscillates between affectionate satire and lyrical seriousness. Humor arises from precise observation of academic absurdities, petty jealousies, pompous lectures and officious rituals, yet moments of tenderness and ethical reflection puncture the comedy. Questions of creativity, mentorship, and the responsibility that comes with expertise give the novel moral weight beneath its witty surface.

Style and legacy
Davies' prose is richly allusive and playful, full of classical, literary and art-historical references that reward attentive readers. He crafts dialogue that crackles with wit while sustaining a humane curiosity about his characters' foibles. The Rebel Angels inaugurates the Cornish Trilogy and establishes recurring preoccupations: the interplay of myth and modernity, the spiritual dimensions of creativity, and the tangled social life of intellectuals.
The novel remains celebrated for its deft blend of erudition and storytelling, capturing both the comic rhythms of academic life and the deeper yearnings that haunt those who devote themselves to culture. It stands as a work that delights in knowledge while reminding readers that knowledge without compassion can be brittle and self-serving.