1886 in literature

Events

• January – MLN: Modern Language Notes, an academic journal, introduces European literary criticism into American scholarship. It is founded at Johns Hopkins University.
• January 5 and January 9 – Robert Louis Stevenson's horror novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde appears in New York and London. Almost 40,000 copies are sold in the first six months.
• January 17 – The Anglo-Irish writers and cousins Somerville and Ross first meet, at Castletownshend, County Cork, Ireland.
• February 22 – The first performance of William Gillette's American Civil War drama Held by the Enemy is held at the Criterion Theater, Brooklyn, New York.
• April 10 – Anatole Baju begins publication of the magazine :fr:Le Décadent|Le Décadent in Paris, in an effort to define and organize the Decadent movement.
• May–July – Robert Louis Stevenson's Scottish historical novel Kidnapped is serialized in the London magazine Young Folks.
• May 7 – Percy Bysshe Shelley's verse drama The Cenci, A Tragedy, in Five Acts, written and printed in Italy in 1819), is first played privately in England, sponsored by the Shelley Society, at the Grand Theatre, Islington, London, before an audience that includes Robert Browning, George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde. Oscar Wilde's review of it in Dramatic Review appears on May 15.
• September 9 – The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works is signed.
• September 18 – The "Symbolist Manifesto" is placed in the French newspaper Le Figaro by a Greek-born poet Jean Moréas, who calls Symbolism hostile to "plain meanings, declamations, false sentimentality and matter-of-fact description," and intended 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 clerk at the Manhattan book store Arthur Hinds & Co., which will become Barnes & Noble.
• November – Rudyard Kipling's Plain Tales from the Hills begin to appear 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. She is buried under the self-penned epitaph "Called Back". After publication of a first collection of her verse in 1890, she will be seen 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.
• The first English language translation of Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary, made by Eleanor Marx, is published by Henry Vizetelly in London.
• John Lubbock compiles a list of 100 books which he considers "necessary for a liberal education".

  New books

Fiction

• Edmondo De Amicis – Heart
• Herman Bang – Ved Vejen
• Emilia Pardo Bazán – Los pazos de Ulloa
• 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
• George Gissing – Demos; A Story of English Socialism
• Maxwell Gray – 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
• Britiffe Constable Skittowe – Sudden Death, or, My Lady the Wolf
• Robert Louis Stevenson –Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
• August Strindberg – Getting Married, vol. II
• Leo Tolstoy – The Death of Ivan Ilyich
• Jules Verne
• *The Lottery Ticket
• *Robur the Conqueror
• Eduard Vilde – :et:Musta mantliga mees|Musta mantliga mees
• Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam – Eva Futura
• Émile Zola – L'Œuvre

  Children and young people

• 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
• Archibald Clavering Gunter – Prince Karl
• Henrik Ibsen – Rosmersholm
• Alexander Kielland – Tre Par
• Leo Tolstoy – The Power of Darkness
• William Butler Yeats – Mosada

  Non-fiction

• Edwin Abbott Abbott – The Kernel and the Husk
• Marian Alford – Needlework as Art
• Edward Wilmot Blyden – Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race
• Edward Dowden – The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley
• 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
• A. E. Waite – The Mysteries of Magic

  Births

• January 14 – Hugh Lofting, English children's writer
• February 11 – May Ziadeh, Lebanese-Palestinian poet, essayist and translator
• February 13 – Ricardo Güiraldes, Argentinian novelist and poet
• March 1 – Oskar Kokoschka, Austrian poet and artist
• March 30 – Frances Cornford, English poet
• April 1 – Brita von Horn, Swedish dramatist, novelist and theatre director
• April 15 – Nikolay Gumilyov, Russian Acmeist poet
• May 16 – Vladislav Khodasevich, Russian poet and critic
• June 26 – Donar Munteanu, Romanian poet and magistrate
• July 16 – Pierre Benoît, French novelist
• July 22 – Hella Wuolijoki, Estonian-born Finnish writer
• July 24 – Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, Japanese novelist
• September 8 – Siegfried Sassoon, English poet and memoirist
• September 20 – Charles Williams, English poet, novelist, playwright and theologian
• October 4 – Lennox Robinson, Irish dramatist, poet and theatre producer
• October 25 – Karl Polanyi, Austro-Hungarian economic historian and social philosopher
• November 1 – Hermann Broch, Austrian Modernist writer
• November 21 – Harold Nicolson, English author
• November 29 – Thomas Burke, English novelist and story writer
• December 5 – Rose Wilder Lane, American journalist and libertarian
• Victor Llona, Peruvian-born translator

  Deaths

• March 17 – Pierre-Jules Hetzel, French publisher
• March 27 – Sir Henry Taylor, English dramatist, poet and public official
• April 9 – Joseph Victor von Scheffel, German poet and novelist
• May 4 – Eliza Lanesford Cushing, American Canadian dramatist, short story writer, and editor
• May 15 – Emily Dickinson, American poet
• May 17 – Erskine May, English constitutional theorist
• June 14 – Alexander Ostrovsky, Russian dramatist
• July 16 – Ned Buntline, American publisher, dime novelist and publicist
• July 21 – Maximilian Wolfgang Duncker, German historian
• August 9 – Samuel Ferguson, Irish poet and antiquary
• October 21 – José Hernández, Argentine poet
• October 22 – Matilda Jane Evans, English-born Australian novelist
• November 21 – Johannes Scherr, German novelist and critic
• November 22 – Mary Chesnut, American diarist
• December 12 – Johan Nicolai Madvig, Danish philologist

  Awards

• Newdigate Prize – R. L. Gales

  In literature

• Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent is set during this year.