The Lyre of Orpheus (The Cornish Trilogy Book 3) (The Franklin Library Signed First Edition Society Series)

472 pp. 8vo. Full dark green leather, gilt titles and decorations, all edges gilt, marbled endpapers, green ribbon marker bound in. Frontispiece, illustrations, and decorative borders by Sherilyn VanValkenburgh. Franklin Library's Signed First Edition Society released signed, limited editions of new works that preceded the trade editions, with a special foreword and frontispiece that appear only in the limited edition. The third book in Davies's Cornish Trilogy. "Baroque and deliciously funny, this third book in The Cornish Trilogy shows Robertson Davies at his very considerable best. There is an important decision to be made. The Cornish Foundation is thriving under the directorship of Arthur Cornish when Arthur and his beguiling wife, Maria Theotoky, decide to undertake a project worthy of Francis Cornish—connoisseur, collector, and notable eccentric—whose vast fortune endows the Foundation. The grumpy, grimy, extraordinarily talented music student Hulda Schnakenburg is commissioned to complete E.T.A. Hoffmann's unfinished opera Arthur of Britain, or The Magnanimous Cuckold; and the scholarly priest Simon Darcourt finds himself charged with writing the libretto. Complications both practical and emotional arise: the gypsy in Maria’s blood rises with a vengeance; Darcourt stoops to petty crime; and various others indulge in perjury, blackmail, and other unsavory pursuits. Hoffmann’s dictum, "the lyre of Orpheus opens the door of the underworld," seems to be all too true—especially when the long-hidden secrets of Francis Cornish himself are finally revealed."