The Cornish Trilogy is three related novels by Canadian novelist, playwright, critic, journalist, and professor Robertson Davies.
The reduction in content to fit the time resulted in omission of numerous elements critical to the full complexity of the narrative as written.
The story of The Rebel Angels is set in motion by the death of eccentric art patron and collector Francis Cornish.
All three executors (and Arthur) are intrigued by Maria Theotoky, Hollier's half-Hungarian, half-Gypsy graduate student, while the plot revolves around John Parlabane: ex-monk, skeptic philosopher, famulus, and general mischief-maker.
His was a full life, and we follow him through 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.