1889 in literature

Events

• January – H. G. Wells begins to teach science at Henley House School, north London, where his pupils include A. A. Milne, whose father runs the school.
• February 12 – Henrik Ibsen's symbolic drama The Lady from the Sea receives simultaneous first performances in Oslo and Weimar.
• March 14 – August Strindberg's naturalistic drama Miss Julie , 1888, is first performed, by the Scandinavian Experimental Theater at the University of Copenhagen. His wife Siri von Essen plays the title rôle.
• April 24 – The Garrick Theatre in London, financed by playwright W. S. Gilbert, opens with a performance of Pinero's The Profligate.
• May 30 – The English publisher Henry Vizetelly is prosecuted for obscenity for the second time in London; he is again fined and imprisoned for his English translations of Émile Zola's works.
• June – Algernon Methuen begins publishing books in England, which is the origin of Methuen Publishing.
• August 30 – Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde are entertained together at dinner at the Langham Hotel, London, by the American Joseph Marshall Stoddart of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, who commissions from them respectively the stories The Sign of the Four and The Picture of Dorian Gray, which appear next year in the magazine.
• September 3 – Jerome K. Jerome's comic fictional English travelogue set on the River Thames, Three Men in a Boat , is published in Bristol.
• November – Leo Tolstoy's novella The Kreutzer Sonata circulates in clandestine copies. In December the Russian authorities confirm that commercial publication will not be permitted.
• September 14 – The Volkstheater, Vienna opens with a performance of Der Fleck auf der Ehr by its Dramaturg, Ludwig Anzengruber, who dies on December 10 from blood poisoning.
• November – Marcel Proust begins a year's service in the French army, stationed at Coligny Barracks in Orléans.
• December 12 – Robert Browning's book Asolando; Fancies and facts is published on the same day hedies at Ca' Rezzonico in Venice. He is buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.

• The first literary novel in the Maltese language, Anton Manwel Caruana's Ineż Farruġ, is published.
• The first of four volumes of Theodore Roosevelt's The Winning of the West is published in the United States.

  New books

Fiction

• Gabriele D'Annunzio – :it:Il piacere |Il piacere
• Herman Bang – Tine
• Wilkie Collins
• *Blind Love
• *The Legacy of Cain
• Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett – New Amazonia
• Marie Corelli – Ardath
• Arthur Conan Doyle
• *Micah Clarke
• *The Mystery of Cloomber
• George Gissing – The Nether World
• H. Rider Haggard – Cleopatra
• Margaret Harkness – In Darkest London
• Jerome K. Jerome – Three Men in a Boat
• George A. Moore – Mike Fletcher
• Armando Palacio Valdés – Sister San Sulpicio
• Bolesław Prus – The Doll
• Molly Elliot Seawell – Hale-Weston
• Robert Louis Stevenson – The Master of Ballantrae
• Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne – The Wrong Box
• Hermann Sudermann – The Cats' Bridge
• Leo Tolstoy – The Kreutzer Sonata
• Mark Twain – A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
• Giovanni Verga – :it:Mastro-don Gesualdo|Mastro-don Gesualdo
• Julius Vogel – Anno Domini 2000, or, Woman's Destiny
• Bertha von Suttner – Die Waffen nieder!
• Edgar Wallace – The Dark Eyes of London
• Oscar Wilde – "The Portrait of Mr. W. H."

  Children and young people

• Lewis Carroll – Sylvie and Bruno
• Andrew Lang – The Blue Fairy Book
• Jules Verne – The Purchase of the North Pole

  Drama

• Anton Chekhov – A Marriage Proposal
• Rasmus Effersøe – Gunnar Havreki
• Sydney Grundy – A Pair of Spectacles
• Gerhart Hauptmann – Before Sunrise
• 'Bjarne P. Holmsen' – Papa Hamlet
• Maurice Maeterlinck – Princess Maleine
• Helena Patursson – Veðurføst
• Hermann Sudermann – Honour
• Leo Tolstoy – The Fruits of Enlightenment
• A. C. Torr and Herbert F. Clark – Ruy Blas and the Blasé Roué

  Poetry

• Herman Gorter – Mei
• Verner von Heidenstam – Vallfart och vandringsår
• William Butler Yeats – The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems

  Non-fiction

• Henri Bergson – Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness
• Helena Petrovna Blavatsky – The Voice of the Silence
• Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk – Positive Theory of Capital
• Edward Carpenter – Civilization: its Cause and Cure
• T. H. Huxley – Agnosticism
• Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers – The Key of Solomon the King
• Friedrich Nietzsche – Götzen-Dämmerung, oder, Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophiert
• Papus – Le Tarot des Bohémiens
• William Mackintire Salter – Ethical Religion
• Oscar Wilde – The Decay of Lying
• Encyclopædia Britannica, 9th edition

  Births

• March 1 – Kanoko Okamoto, Japanese novelist and poet
• April 7 – Gabriela Mistral, Chilean poet, Nobel Prize laureate
• April 18 – Horace Alexander, English current-affairs writer and ornithologist
• May 12 – Ouyang Yuqian, Chinese dramatist
• June 23 – Anna Akhmatova, Russian poet
• July 5 – Jean Cocteau, French writer
• July 17 – Erle Stanley Gardner, American author
• August 5 – Conrad Aiken, American novelist and poet
• August 22 – Peter Frederick Anson, English writer on religion and maritime matters
• September 1 – Leonora Eyles, English feminist writer and novelist
• September 15 – Claude McKay, Jamaican American writer
• September 23 – Walter Lippmann, American writer
• September 25
• *G. D. H. Cole, English political theorist, economist and historian
• *C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, Scottish writer and translator
• September 26 – Martin Heidegger, German philosopher
• October 18 – Fannie Hurst, American novelist
• November 12 – DeWitt Wallace, American magazine publisher

  Deaths

• January 3 – James Halliwell-Phillipps, English bibliophile
• January 17 – Juan Montalvo, Ecuadorian writer
• April 23 – Jules Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly, French novelist
• June 8 – Gerard Manley Hopkins, English poet
• June 15 – Mihai Eminescu, Romanian poet
• August 5 – Fanny Lewald, German novelist
• August 19 – Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, French Symbolist writer
• September 10 – Amy Levy, English feminist poet and novelist
• September 23 – Wilkie Collins, English novelist
• October 25 – Émile Augier, French dramatist
• November 18 – William Allingham, Irish poet
• December 10 – Ludwig Anzengruber, Austrian poet
• December 12 – Robert Browning, English poet
• December 17 – Thomas Purnell, Welsh-born English drama critic and essayist

  Awards

• Gaisford Prize – Harold Trevor Baker