Toronto Trilogy

"The Toronto Trilogy" refers to two separate series of Canadian novels by Austin Clarke and Robertson Davies.

Clarke's novels, originally published sequentially as The Meeting Point (1967), Storm of Fortune (1973) and The Bigger Light (1975), centre on a group of West Indian domestics living in and working in Toronto, Ontario.

Whether it was planned or not, Davies' novels formed trilogies. In the 1950s he published his Salterton Trilogy; in the 1970s he published his most famous trilogy, The Deptford Trilogy; this was followed in the 1980s by The Cornish Trilogy.

In the 1990s Davies had published two more novels — Murther and Walking Spirits and The Cunning Man — before his death in 1995.

In his introduction to The Merry Heart, a collection of Davies' writings published posthumously, Davies' publisher, Douglas M. Gibson, tells how Davies had been researching and preparing the novel which would have followed The Cunning Man and would have been the third in the series. Gibson speculates that this unfinished trilogy might have been called the "Toronto Trilogy".

References

• Davies, Robertson, The Merry Heart: Selections 1980–1995, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 1996. ISBN 077102584X