After Upper Canada College, he studied at Queen’s University at Kingston, Ontario, from 1932 until 1935. At Queen’s, he was enrolled as a special student not working towards a degree, and wrote for the student paper, The Queen’s Journal. He left Canada to study at Balliol College, Oxford, where he received a BLitt degree in 1938. The next year he published his thesis, Shakespeare’s Boy Actors, and embarked on an acting career outside London. In 1940, he played small roles and did literary work for the director at the Old Vic Repertory Company in London. Also that year, Davies married Australian Brenda Mathews, whom he had met at Oxford, and who was then working as stage manager for the theatre. They spent their honeymoon in the Welsh countryside at Fronfraith Hall, Abermule, Montgomery, the family house owned by Rupert Davies.

Davies and his new bride returned to Canada in 1940, where he took the position of literary editor at Saturday Night magazine. Two years later, he became editor of the Peterborough Examiner in the small city of Peterborough, Ontario, northeast of Toronto. Again he was able to mine his experiences here for many of the characters and situations which later appeared in his novels and plays.

Davies was married to Brenda Ethel Davies (1917–2013) in 1940 and survived by four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren from his three daughters Miranda Davies, Rosamond Bailey and author Jennifer Surridge.

Eros at Breakfast was followed by Fortune, My Foe in 1949 and At My Heart’s Core, a three-act play, in 1950. Meanwhile, Davies was writing humorous essays in the Examiner under the pseudonym Samuel Marchbanks. Some of these were collected and published in The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947), The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks (1949), and later in Samuel Marchbanks’ Almanack (1967). An omnibus edition of the three Marchbanks books, with new notes by the author, was published under the title The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks in 1985.

During his retirement from academe he continued to write novels which further established him as a major figure in the literary world: Murther and Walking Spirits (1991) and The Cunning Man (1994). A third novel in what would have been a further trilogy – the Toronto Trilogy – was in progress at the time of Davies’ death. He also realized a long-held dream when he penned the libretto to an opera: The Golden Ass, based on The Metamorphoses of Lucius Apuleius, just like that written by one of the characters in Davies’ 1958 A Mixture of Frailties. The opera was performed by the Canadian Opera Company at the Hummingbird Centre in Toronto, in April 1999, several years after Davies’ death.

In 1960, Davies joined Trinity College at the University of Toronto, where he would teach literature until 1981. The following year he published a collection of essays on literature, A Voice From the Attic, and was awarded the Lorne Pierce Medal for his literary achievements.

In 1963, he became the Master of Massey College, the University of Toronto’s new graduate college. During his stint as Master, he initiated a tradition of writing and telling ghost stories at the yearly Christmas celebrations. His stories were later collected in the book, High Spirits (1982).

Davies was born in Thamesville, Ontario, the third son of William Rupert Davies and Florence Sheppard McKay. Growing up, Davies was surrounded by books and lively language. His father, senator of Kingston, Ontario, from 1942 to his death in 1967, was a newspaperman from Welshpool, Wales, and both parents were voracious readers. He followed in their footsteps and read everything he could. He also participated in theatrical productions as a child, where he developed a lifelong interest in drama.

When Davies retired from his position at the university, his seventh novel, a satire of academic life, The Rebel Angels (1981), was published, followed by What’s Bred in the Bone (1985) which was short-listed for the Booker Prize for fiction in 1986. The Lyre of Orpheus (1988) follows these two books in what became known as The Cornish Trilogy.

In its obituary, The Times wrote: “Davies encompassed all the great elements of life … His novels combined deep seriousness and psychological inquiry with fantasy and exuberant mirth.” He remained close friends with John Kenneth Galbraith, attending Galbraith’s eighty-fifth birthday party in Boston in 1993, and became so close a friend and colleague of the American novelist John Irving that Irving gave one of the scripture readings at Davies’ funeral in the chapel of Trinity College, Toronto. He also wrote in support of Salman Rushdie when the latter was threatened by a fatwā from Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran in reaction to supposed anti-Islam expression in his novel The Satanic Verses.