High spirits

Robertson Davies

Viking Press, Oct 27, 1983 - Fiction - 198 pages

Presents an entertaining and witty collection of eighteen stories about ghosts, including such notable literary apparitions as Ibsen and Charles Dickens

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - gypsysmom - LibraryThing

It would have been worth doing a Ph. D. at the University of Toronto in the 1960s and 70s to have been invited to the Christmas Party at Massey College. Massey College was newly built with a generous ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - mrgan - LibraryThing

This collection of ghost stories (sort of) written for and set in the academia of the University of Toronto is well-written but ultimately rather dull stuff. These tales were meant to be read out loud ...

Contents

• HOW THE HIGH SPIRITS CAME ABOUT: 1
• REVELATION FROM A SMOKY FIRE: 7
• THE GHOST WHO VANISHED BY DEGREES: 13

About the author

Novelist, playwright, and journalist, Robertson Davies is one of Canada's best-known writers internationally. He grew up in Kingston, Ontario, where he later attended Queen's University. In 1938, he received a B.Litt. from Oxford, and then joined the Old Vic Theatre Company. Returning to Canada in 1940, he served as editor of the influential publication Saturday Night until 1942. For the next 20 years he was editor of the Peterborough Examiner in Ontario, where he wrote the Samuel Marchbanks Sketches. From 1953 to 1971 he served on the board of the Stratford Festival. In 1963 Davies became the first master of Massey College, a graduate college at the University of Toronto. In the 1970s Davies published the Deptford Trilogy - Fifth Business (1970), The Manticore (1972), and World of Wonders (1975). Beginning in 1981, Davies published the Cornish Trilogy - The Rebel Angels (1981), What's Bred in the Bone (1985), and The Lyre of Orpheus (1988). These novels, with their academic setting, reveal Davies's awareness of Canada's intellectual and artistic sophistication.

Bibliographic information

• Title: High spirits; Penguin short fiction
• Author: Robertson Davies
• Publisher: Viking Press, 1983
• ISBN: 0670371548, 9780670371549
• Length: 198 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / General; Fiction / Ghost; Fiction / Horror; Ghost stories; Ghost stories, Canadian; Ghost stories, Canadian (English)