1881 in literature

Events

• February 13 – The first issue of the feminist newspaper La Citoyenne is published by Hubertine Auclert in France.
• March – Ambrose Bierce contributes to the weekly satirical San Francisco magazine The Wasp and resumes his column "Prattle" and the series of cynical definitions which he first calls The Devil's Dictionary.
• April – William Poel's production of Shakespeare's Hamlet at St. George's Hall, London, reverts to the first quarto text and avoids elaborate scene changes.
• April 23 – Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera Patience, a satire on Oscar Wilde and aestheticism, opens with George Grossmith in the lead at the Opera Comique in London.
• July 7 – Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio, a children's story about a wooden puppet in Tuscany, begins to be serialized in the first issue of Giornale per i Bambini, a supplement to the Roman Sunday newspaper :it:Fanfulla della domenica|Fanfulla della domenica.
• July 29 – The Law on the Freedom of the Press is passed in France.
• August 17 – The Pushkin Prize is established by the Russian Academy of Sciences.
• October 1 – Robert Louis Stevenson's children's pirate adventure novel Treasure Island begins serialization in the British magazine Young Folks as Treasure Island; or, The mutiny of the Hispaniola by "Captain George North".
• The first of the three-volume History of Woman Suffrage, is published by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the United States.
• Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy's historical drama Tsar Boris receives its première, posthumously, at Anna Brenko's Pushkin Theater in Moscow.
• The literary review and movement La Jeune Belgique is founded by the poet Max Waller.

  New books

Fiction

• William Harrison Ainsworth – Stanley Brereton
• Emilia Pardo Bazán – Un viaje de novios
• Mary Elizabeth Braddon – Asphodel
• Robert Buchanan – God and the Man
• Bankim Chatterjee – Rajsimha
• Wilkie Collins – The Black Robe
• Machado de Assis – The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas
• Antonio Fogazzaro – Malombra
• Anatole France – Sylvestre Bonnard
• Thomas Hardy – A Laodicean
• Henry Honor – The Great Romance
• Joris-Karl Huysmans – En Ménage
• Robert G. Ingersoll – The Great Infidels
• Henry James – The Portrait of a Lady
• Nikolai Leskov – The Tale of Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and the Steel Flea
• Margaret Oliphant – Harry Joscelyn
• "Jack Saul" – The Sins of the Cities of the Plain
• Joseph Henry Shorthouse – John Inglesant
• Giovanni Verga – I Malavoglia
• Jules Verne – Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon

  Children and young people

• Joel Chandler Harris – Uncle Remus
• Talbot Baines Reed – The Fifth Form at St. Dominic's
• Bram Stoker – Under the Sunset
• Mrs. Humphry Ward – Milly and Olly

  Drama

• Henrik Ibsen
• *Ghosts
• *Catiline
• William Young – Pendragon

  Poetry

• Roden Noël – A Little Child's Monument

  Non-fiction

• Florence Caddy – Lares et Penates, or, The Background of Life
• Jefferson Davis – The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government
• Warren Felt Evans – The Divine Law of Cure
• Walter Gregor – Notes on the Folk-Lore of the North-East of Scotland
• Alice Diehl – The Story of Philosophy
• Hermann Schultz – Die Lehre von der Gottheit Christi
• Alfred Percy Sinnett – The Occult World
• John Francon Williams – The Geography of the Oceans

  Births

• January 9
• *Lascelles Abercrombie, English poet and literary critic
• *Giovanni Papini, Italian writer
• January 18 – Gaston Gallimard, French publisher
• January 28 – Ruby M. Ayres, English romance novelist
• February 10 – Boris Zaytsev, Russian novelist and dramatist
• February 13 – Eleanor Farjeon, English children's writer and poet
• March 4 – Thomas Sigismund Stribling, American novelist
• March 14 – Eugeniu Ștefănescu-Est, Romanian poet, novelist and cartoonist
• March 17 – Kristian Elster, Norwegian novelist, literary historian and biographer
• March 25 – Mary Webb, English novelist
• April 14 – Husain Salaahuddin, Maldivian writer
• May 13 – Lima Barreto, Brazilian novelist and journalist
• July 22 – Margery Williams, English-born American children's writer
• August 1 – Rose Macaulay, English novelist, biographer and travel writer
• August 2 – Ethel M. Dell, English romantic fiction writer
• August 10 – Witter Bynner, American poet and scholar
• August 24 – Nicolae Petrescu-Comnen, Romanian social scientist, historian and poet
• October 5 – Barbu Lăzăreanu, Romanian literary historian, poet, and communist journalist
• October 15 – P. G. Wodehouse, English-born American humorous novelist
• October 30 – Elizabeth Madox Roberts, American novelist and poet

Deaths

• January 12 – George Robert Aberigh-Mackay, Anglo-Indian author
• January 28 – Fyodor Dostoevsky, Russian novelist
• January 30 – Anna Maria Hall, Irish novelist
• March 23 – George Métivier, Guernsey poet writing in Guernésiais
• April 19 – Benjamin Disraeli, English novelist and politician
• April 24 – James Thomas Fields, American publisher
• July 1 – Hermann Lotze, German philosopher
• July 12 – Caroline Leakey, English poet and novelist
• October 13 – Mary Emma Ebsworth, English dramatist
• November 1 – Jacques Perk, Dutch poet
• December 13 – August Šenoa, Croatian novelist and critic
• unkown date – Liu Xizai, Chinese scholar and literary critic