1886 in literature

Events

January – MLN: Modern Language Notes, an academic journal established with the intention of introducing European literary criticism into American scholarship, is founded at Johns Hopkins University.

January 5 & 9 – Robert Louis Stevenson's horror novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is first published in New York and London respectively; within the first six months, close to 40,000 copies are sold.

January 17 – The Anglo-Irish writers and cousins Somerville and Ross first meet, at Castletownshend, County Cork, Ireland.

February 22 – First performance of William Gillette's American Civil War drama Held by the Enemy, at the Criterion Theatre, Brooklyn (New York).

May–July – Robert Louis Stevenson's Scottish historical novel Kidnapped is serialized in the London magazine Young Folks.

May 7 – First performance of Percy Bysshe Shelley's verse drama The Cenci, A Tragedy, in Five Acts (written and printed in Italy, 1819) in England, a private production sponsored by the Shelley Society at the Grand Theatre, Islington, London, before an audience that includes Robert Browning (for whose birthday it is performed), George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde.

September 9 – Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works signed.

September 18 – The "Symbolist Manifesto" (Le Symbolisme) is published in French newspaper Le Figaro by Greek-born poet Jean Moréas, who announces that Symbolism is hostile to "plain meanings, declamations, false sentimentality and matter-of-fact description," and that its goal instead is to "clothe the Ideal in a perceptible form" whose "goal was not in itself, but whose sole purpose was to express the Ideal".

Fall – Clifford Barnes is taken on as a bookstore clerk with Arthur Hinds & Co. in Manhattan, which will become Barnes & Noble.

November – Rudyard Kipling's Plain Tales from the Hills begin publication in the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette under the British Raj.

May 15 – Emily Dickinson dies aged 55 of Bright's disease at the family home in Amherst, Massachusetts with fewer than a dozen of her 1,800 poems published and is buried under the self-penned epitaph "Called Back". She will later be regarded (with Walt Whitman) as one of the two quintessential nineteenth-century American poets.

A Japanese adaptation of Shakespeare's play Hamlet as Hamuretto Yamato Nishiki-e is serialized in the newspaper Tokyo Eiri Shimbun.

Fiction

Edmondo De Amicis – Heart (Cuore)

Herman Bang – Ved Vejen (published in the collection Stille Eksistenser)

Emilia Pardo Bazán – Los pazos de Ulloa ("The House of Ulloa", publication commenced)

Leon Bloy – Disperato

Rhoda Broughton – Doctor Cupid

Hall Caine – A Son of Hagar

Mary Cholmondeley – The Danvers Jewels

Wilkie Collins

The Evil Genius

The Guilty River

Marie Corelli – A Romance of Two Worlds

Alice Diehl – Griselda

Maxwell Gray (Mary Gleed Tuttiett) – The Silence of Dean Maitland

Thomas Hardy – The Mayor of Casterbridge

William Dean Howells – Indian Summer

Fergus Hume – The Mystery of a Hansom Cab

Henry James – The Bostonians

Jerome K. Jerome – The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Lie Kim Hok – Tjhit Liap Seng

Vladimir Korolenko – The Blind Musician

Pierre Loti – Pêcheur d'Islande

Jules Mary – Roger la Honte

Octave Mirbeau – Le Calvaire

George A. Moore

A Drama in Muslin

Confessions of a Young Man

Bolesław Prus – The Outpost (Placówka; serialization completed & book publication)

Robert Louis Stevenson –Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

August Strindberg – Getting Married (Giftas), vol. II (short stories)

Leo Tolstoy – The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Смерть Ивана Ильича, Smert' Ivana Ilyicha)

Jules Verne

The Lottery Ticket

Robur the Conqueror

Eduard Vilde – Musta mantliga mees (Man in a Black Coat)

Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam – Eva Futura

Émile Zola – L'Œuvre

Children and young adults

Louisa May Alcott – Jo's Boys

Frances Hodgson Burnett – Little Lord Fauntleroy

L. T. Meade – A World of Girls. The Story of a School

Robert Louis Stevenson – Kidnapped

Drama

Anton Chekhov – On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco

Henrik Ibsen – Rosmersholm

Alexander Kielland – Tre Par

Leo Tolstoy – The Power of Darkness (not produced until 1902)

William Butler Yeats – Mosada

Non-fiction

Edwin Abbott Abbott – The Kernel and the Husk

Warren Felt Evans – Esoteric Christianity and Mental Therapeutics

William Morris – A Dream of John Ball

Emily Ruete – Memoirs of an Arabian Princess: An Autobiography

Charles Taze Russell – The Plan of the Ages (later retitled The Divine Plan of the Ages; vol. 1 of Millennial Dawn, later retitled Studies in the Scriptures)

A. E. Waite – The Mysteries of Magic

Births

January 14 – Hugh Lofting, English children's writer (died 1947)

February 13 – Ricardo Güiraldes, Argentinian novelist and poet (died 1927)

March 1 – Oskar Kokoschka, Austrian poet and artist (died 1980)

March 30 – Frances Cornford (née Darwin, FCC), English poet (died 1960)

April 1 – Brita von Horn, Swedish dramatist, novelist and theatre director (died 1983)

May 16 – Vladislav Khodasevich, Russian poet and critic (died 1939)

June 26 – Donar Munteanu, Romanian poet and magistrate (died 1972)

July 16 – Pierre Benoît, French novelist (died 1962)

July 22 – Hella Wuolijoki, Estonian-born Finnish writer (died 1954)

July 24 – Jun'ichirō Tanizaki (谷崎 潤一郎), Japanese novelist (died 1965)

September 8 – Siegfried Sassoon, English poet and memoirist (died 1967)

September 20 – Charles Williams, English poet, novelist, playwright and theologian (died 1945)

October 4 – Lennox Robinson, Irish dramatist, poet and theatre producer (died 1958)

November 1 – Hermann Broch, Austrian Modernist writer (died 1951)

November 21 – Harold Nicolson, English author (died 1968)

November 29 – Thomas Burke, English novelist and story writer (died 1945)

December 5 – Rose Wilder Lane, American journalist and libertarian (died 1968)

Deaths

March 17 – Pierre-Jules Hetzel, French publisher (born 1814)

March 27 – Sir Henry Taylor, English dramatist, poet and public official (born 1800)

April 9 – Joseph Victor von Scheffel, German poet and novelist (born 1826)

May 4 – Eliza Lanesford Cushing, American Canadian dramatist, short story writer, and editor (born 1794)

May 15 – Emily Dickinson, American poet (born 1830)

May 17 – Erskine May, English constitutional theorist (born 1815)

June 14 – Alexander Ostrovsky, Russian dramatist (born 1823)

July 21 – Maximilian Wolfgang Duncker, German historian (born 1811)

August 9 – Samuel Ferguson, Irish poet and antiquary (born 1810)

October 22 – Matilda Jane Evans, English-born Australian novelist (born 1827)

November 21 – Johannes Scherr, German novelist and critic (born 1817)

November 22 – Mary Chesnut, American diarist (born 1823)

December 12 – Johan Nicolai Madvig, Danish philologist (born 1804)

Awards

Newdigate Prize – R. L. Gales

In literature

Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent (1907) is set during this year.