Although a prolific novelist, he is remembered mainly for the monumental publication The Oxford Book of English Verse 1250–1900 (later extended to 1918) and for his literary criticism.

He influenced many who never met him, including American writer Helene Hanff, author of 84, Charing Cross Road and its sequel, Q's Legacy.

[2] His The Oxford Book of English Verse was a favourite of John Mortimer's fictional character Horace Rumpole.

He was the son of Dr Thomas Quiller Couch (d. 1884), who was a noted physician, folklorist and historian[3][4] who married Mary Ford and lived at 63, Fore Street, Bodmin, until his death in 1884.

[10] Kenneth Grahame inscribed a first edition of his The Wind in the Willows to Arthur's daughter, Foy Felicia, attributing Quiller-Couch as the inspiration for the character Ratty.

(Cornwall Pioneers) was an unusual battalion, having been raised in March 1915, not by the War Office, but by the Mayor and citizens of Truro.

It initially had only two officers – Colonel Dudley Acland Mills, who had retired from the Royal Engineers six years earlier, and Quiller-Couch, who was devoid of any military experience.

In 1887, while he was attending Oxford, he published Dead Man's Rock, a romance in the style of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, and later The Astonishing History of Troy Town (1888), a comic novel set in a fictionalised version of his home town of Fowey, and The Splendid Spur (1889).

He was appointed King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge in 1912, and retained the chair for the rest of his life.

Castle Dor, a re-telling of the Tristan and Iseult myth in modern circumstances, was left unfinished at Quiller-Couch's death and was completed many years later by Daphne du Maurier.

His Cambridge inaugural lecture series, published as On the Art of Writing, is the source of the popular writers' adage "murder your darlings":[22] If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: 'Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press.