1872 in literature

Events

March – Sheridan Le Fanu's Gothic vampire novella Carmilla concludes serialization in the monthly The Dark Blue and (later in the year) is included in his collection In a Glass Darkly. Set in Styria, it is influential in introducing the lesbian vampire genre.

June 19 – The Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire is established in Straßburg as the Kaiserliche Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek zu Straßburg, a public regional and academic library for the new German Imperial territory of Alsace-Lorraine (Reichsland Elsass-Lothringen) following destruction of its predecessors during the Siege of Strasbourg in the Franco-Prussian War.

July 7 – Paul Verlaine abandons his family to go to London with Arthur Rimbaud.

September 30 – George MacDonald arrives in Boston to begin a lecture tour of the United States.

December 3 – George Smith presents the first translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh to a meeting of the Society of Biblical Archaeology in London.

December 22 – Jules Verne's novel Around the World in Eighty Days (Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours) concludes serialization (begun on November 2) in the daily newspaper Le Temps (Paris) the day following the concluding date of the narrative.

The Federation of Madrid expels all signatories of a subversive article in La Emancipación (including Paul Lafargue).

Benito Pérez Galdós begins writing the long series of historical novels known as Episodios Nacionales with Trafalgar.

Rose la Touche rejects John Ruskin for the last time.

Lafcadio Hearn becomes a reporter on the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer.

The first university course in American Literature is taught at Princeton University by John Seely Hart.

The Scottish Gaelic magazine Féillire is first published as Almanac Gàilig air son 1872 in Inverness.

Fiction

Machado de Assis – Ressurreição

Mary Elizabeth Braddon – To the Bitter End

Rhoda Broughton

Good-bye, Sweetheart!

Poor Pretty Bobby

Samuel Butler – Erewhon

Edward Bulwer-Lytton – The Parisians

Wilkie Collins – Poor Miss Finch

Alphonse Daudet – Tartarin de Tarascon

Fyodor Dostoevsky – Demons (Бесы, Bésy, originally translated as The Possessed)

Alexandre Dumas, père – Création et Rédemption

George Eliot – Middlemarch (serial publication concluded)

Thomas Hardy – Under the Greenwood Tree (By the author of Desperate Remedies)

Mór Jókai

Eppur si muove – És mégis mozog a Föld

The Man with the Golden Touch (Az arany ember)

Sheridan Le Fanu

In a Glass Darkly

Willing to Die

Eliza Lynn Linton – The True History of Joshua Davidson|The True History of Joshua Davidson, Christian and Communist

Margaret Oliphant – At His Gates

Bayard Taylor – Beauty and The Beast, and Tales of Home

Anthony Trollope – The Golden Lion of Granpere

Jules Verne

The Adventures of Three Englishmen and Three Russians in South Africa (Aventures de trois Russes et de trois Anglais dans l'Afrique australe)

The Fur Country (Le Pays des fourrures)

Émile Zola – La Curée

Children and young adults

R. D. Blackmore – The Maid of Sker

Juliana Horatia Ewing – A Flat Iron for a Farthing

George MacDonald – The Princess and the Goblin

Susan Coolidge – What Katy Did (first in the What Katy Did series of five books)

Drama

Franz Grillparzer – The Jewess of Toledo (Die Jüdin von Toledo, first performed posthumously, written 1851)

Prosper Mérimée – La Chambre bleue (published posthumously)

August Strindberg – Master Olof

Ivan Turgenev – A Month in the Country (first performed)

Poetry

José Hernández – Martín Fierro (first part)

Non-fiction

Chambers's English Dictionary

William Cullen Bryant – Picturesque America, vol. 1

Warren Felt Evans – Mental Medicine

Friedrich Nietzsche – The Birth of Tragedy (Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik)

Henry Wilson – History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, vols. 1 & 2

Births

January 31 – Zane Grey, American Western novelist (died 1939)

April 4 – Frida Uhl, Austrian writer (died 1943)

May 21 (May 9 O.S.) – Teffi, born Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya, Russian-born humorist (died 1952)

May 31 – W. Heath Robinson, English cartoonist and illustrator (died 1944)

June 27 – Paul Laurence Dunbar, African American poet, novelist and playwright (died 1906)

August 24 – Max Beerbohm, English essayist and parodist (died 1956)

September 15 – Frances Garnet Wolseley, English horticulturist and garden writer (died 1936)

October 20 – F. M. Mayor, English novelist (died 1932)

December 28 – Pío Baroja, Spanish novelist (died 1956)

Deaths

January 21 – Franz Grillparzer, Austrian poet and dramatist (born 1791)

March 4 – Carsten Hauch, Danish poet (born 1790)

March 10 – Giuseppe Mazzini, Italian philosopher, journalist and politician (born 1805)

March 11 – Emily Taylor, English author, poet and hymn writer (born 1795)

April 1 – Frederick Denison Maurice, English theologian (born 1805)

April 13 – Samuel Bamford, English writer, poet and radical (born 1788)

April 20 – Ljudevit Gaj, Croatian linguist and journalist (born 1809)

May 13 – Moritz Hartmann, German poet (born 1821)

June 1 – Charles Lever, Irish novelist (born 1806)

August 8 – Heinrich Abeken, German theologian (born 1809)

September 22 – Vladimir Dal, Russian lexicographer (born 1801)

October 21 – Jean-Henri Merle d'Aubigné, Swiss historian (born 1794)

November 16 – William Gilham, American military writer (born 1818)

December 23 – Théophile Gautier, French poet and novelist (born 1811)

In literature

Anthony Trollope's novel The Way We Live Now (1875) is set during this year.