1875 in literature

Events

• January 16 – Henry James Byron's comedy Our Boys opens at the Vaudeville Theatre in London. It becomes the world's longest-running play so far, with 1,362 performances up to April 1879. It also opens this year in New York, at the New Fifth Avenue Theatre.
• February/March – Arthur Rimbaud meets Paul Verlaine in Stuttgart, Germany, after Verlaine's release from prison, and gives him the manuscript of his poems Illuminations. Rimbaud stops writing literature entirely at the age of 20.
• February 12 – Robert Louis Stevenson is introduced to fellow writer W. E. Henley, at the time a patient of surgeon Joseph Lister in the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. He will be the model for Long John Silver. Henley also meets his future wife while in hospital and writes the poems collected as In Hospital.
• October 1 – American poet and short story writer Edgar Allan Poe is reburied in Westminster Hall and Burying Ground, Baltimore, Maryland, with a larger memorial marker. Controversy arises years later as to whether the correct body was exhumed.
• December 5–6 – The German emigrant ship SS Deutschland runs aground in the English Channel, causing the death of 157 passengers and crew and inspiring Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem The Wreck of the Deutschland. This introduces his innovative sprung rhythm and metre, but is rejected for publication in 1876. It will not appear finally until 1918.

• The Flammarion publishing firm is founded in Paris, France.
• Isaac K. Funk establishes the U.S. publisher I. K. Funk & Company, predecessor of Funk & Wagnells.
• Caroline M. Hewins begins a children's library in Hartford, Connecticut.
• Nebelspalter is founded by Jean Nötzli of Zürich as an "illustrated humorous political weekly".

  New books

Fiction

• W. Harrison Ainsworth – The Goldsmith's Wife
• R. D. Blackmore – Alice Lorraine
• Mary Elizabeth Braddon – Hostages to Fortune
• Wilkie Collins – The Law and the Lady
• Alphonse Daudet – Contes du Lundi
• Fyodor Dostoevsky – The Raw Youth
• Bonifaciu Florescu – Etiam contra omnes
• Benito Pérez Galdós – Saragossa
• William Dean Howells – A Foregone Conclusion
• Henry James – Roderick Hudson
• Julia Kavanagh – John Dorrien
• Helen Mathers – Comin' thro' the Rye
• Karl May – Old Firehand
• George Meredith – Beauchamp's Career
• José Maria de Eça de Queiroz – O Crime do Padre Amaro
• Anthony Trollope – The Way We Live Now
• Jules Verne – The Survivors of the Chancellor
• Edmund Yates – Two, by Tricks
• Charlotte Mary Yonge – The Brother's Wife
• Émile Zola – La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret

  Children and young people

• Georgina Castle Smith – Froggy's Little Brother
• Louisa May Alcott – Eight Cousins
• George MacDonald – The Lost Princess
• Mary Louisa Molesworth – Tell Me a Story

  Drama

• Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson – En fallit
• Henri de Bornier – La Fille de Roland
• H. J. Byron – Our Boys
• José Echegaray – En el puño de la espada
• Guy de Maupassant – :fr:À la feuille de rose, maison turque|À la feuille de rose, maison turque
• Alfred Tennyson – Queen Mary

  Poetry

• Wilfrid Scawen Blunt – Sonnets and Songs of Proteus
• Alice Meynell – Preludes
• See also 1875 in poetry

  Non-fiction

• Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, vol. 1
• Swami Dayanand – Satyarth Prakash
• Bartolomé de las Casas – History of the Indies
• Edward Dowden – Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art
• Mary Baker Eddy – Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures
• Warren Felt Evans – Soul and Body
• Francis Galton – "The History of Twins, as a criterion of the relative powers of nature and nurture"
• Mark Pattison – '
• Baron Jules Dupotet de Sennevoy – La Magie dévoilée
• Lysander Spooner – '
• John Addington Symonds
• *The Age of the Despots
• *Picturesque Europe

  Births

• January 4 – William Williams, Welsh poet
• February 8 – Valentine O'Hara, Irish author and authority on Russia and Baltic
• March 30 – Edmund Clerihew Bentley, English writer
• April 1 – Edgar Wallace, English thriller writer
• April 9 – Jacques Futrelle, American author
• April 18
• * Oskar Ernst Bernhardt, German author
• * Katherine Thurston, Irish novelist
• June 6 – Thomas Mann, German novelist and Nobel Prize winner
• June 24 – Forrest Reid, Irish novelist and literary critic
• July 9 – W. W. Greg, English literary scholar
• July 19 – Alice Dunbar Nelson African American poet, journalist and political activist of the Harlem Renaissance
• July 26 – Antonio Machado, Spanish poet
• August 21 – Winnifred Eaton, Canadian author
• August 26 – John Buchan, Scottish novelist and diplomat
• September 1 – Edgar Rice Burroughs, American popular novelist
• October 13 – Armand Praviel, French poet, novelist, and journalist
• October – George Ranetti, Romanian humorist and playwright
• December 4 – Rainer Maria Rilke, Austrian poet

• Gertrude Minnie Faulding, English children's writer and novelist

  Deaths

• January 3 – Pierre Larousse, French grammarian and lexicographer
• January 23 – Charles Kingsley, English novelist and cleric
• March 1 – Tristan Corbière, French poet
• March 25 – Louis Amédée Achard, French novelist
• June 2 – Józef Kremer, Polish philosopher
• June 4 – Eduard Mörike, German poet
• June 18 – António Feliciano de Castilho, Portuguese poet and author
• August 4 – Hans Christian Andersen, Danish fairy-tale writer
• August 12 – János Kardos, Slovenian Evangelical priest, teacher, and writer
• August 19 – Robert Elis, Welsh writer
• October 10 – Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, Russian poet, novelist and dramatist
• October 24 – Jacques Paul Migne, French priest, theologian, and publisher
• November 17 – Hilario Ascasubi, Argentine poet

• Emilia Marryat, English children's writer