1872 in literature

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This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1872.

Events

• March – Sheridan Le Fanu's Gothic vampire novella Carmilla concludes serialization in the monthly The Dark Blue and (later in the year) is included in his collection In a Glass Darkly. Set in Styria, it is influential in introducing the lesbian vampire genre.
• June 19 – The Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire is established in Straßburg as the Kaiserliche Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek zu Straßburg, a public regional and academic library for the new German Imperial territory of Alsace-Lorraine (Reichsland Elsass-Lothringen) following destruction of its predecessors during the Siege of Strasbourg in the Franco-Prussian War.
• July 7 – Paul Verlaine abandons his family to go to London with Arthur Rimbaud.
• September 30 – George MacDonald arrives in Boston to begin a lecture tour of the United States.
• December 3 – George Smith presents the first translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh to a meeting of the Society of Biblical Archaeology in London.
• December 22 – Jules Verne's novel Around the World in Eighty Days (Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours) concludes serialization (begun on November 2) in the daily newspaper Le Temps (Paris) the day following the concluding date of the narrative.
• The Federation of Madrid expels all signatories of a subversive article in La Emancipación (including Paul Lafargue).
• Benito Pérez Galdós begins writing the long series of historical novels known as Episodios Nacionales with Trafalgar.
• Rose la Touche rejects John Ruskin for the last time.
• Lafcadio Hearn becomes a reporter on the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer.
• The Scottish Gaelic magazine Féillire is first published as Almanac Gàilig air son 1872 in Inverness.

New books

• Machado de Assis – Ressurreição
• R. D. Blackmore – The Maid of Sker
• Mary Elizabeth Braddon – To the Bitter End
• Rhoda Broughton
  • Good-bye, Sweetheart!
  • Poor Pretty Bobby
• Samuel Butler – Erewhon
• Edward Bulwer-Lytton – The Parisians
• Wilkie Collins – Poor Miss Finch
• Susan Coolidge – What Katy Did
• Alphonse Daudet – Tartarin de Tarascon
• Fyodor Dostoevsky – Demons (Бесы, Bésy, originally translated as The Possessed)
• Alexandre Dumas, père – Création et Rédemption
• George Eliot – Middlemarch (serial publication concluded)
• Thomas Hardy – Under the Greenwood Tree ("By the author of Desperate Remedies")
• Mór Jókai
  • Eppur si muove – És mégis mozog a Föld
  • The Man with the Golden Touch (Az arany ember)
• Sheridan Le Fanu
  • In a Glass Darkly
  • Willing to Die
• Eliza Lynn Linton – The True History of Joshua Davidson, Christian and Communist
• Margaret Oliphant – At His Gates
• Bayard Taylor – Beauty and The Beast, and Tales of Home
• Anthony Trollope – The Golden Lion of Granpere
• Jules Verne
  • The Adventures of Three Englishmen and Three Russians in South Africa (Aventures de trois Russes et de trois Anglais dans l'Afrique australe)
  • The Fur Country (Le Pays des fourrures)
• Émile Zola – La Curée

New drama

• Franz Grillparzer – The Jewess of Toledo (Die Jüdin von Toledo, first performed, posthumously (written 1851))
• Prosper Mérimée – La Chambre bleue (published posthumously)
• August Strindberg – Master Olof
• Ivan Turgenev – A Month in the Country (first performed)

Poetry

• José Hernández – Martín Fierro (first part)

Non-fiction

• Chambers's English Dictionary
• William Cullen Bryant – Picturesque America, vol. 1
• Warren Felt Evans – Mental Medicine
• Friedrich Nietzsche – The Birth of Tragedy (Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik)
• Henry Wilson – History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, vols. 1 & 2

Births

• January 31 – Zane Grey, American Western novelist (died 1939)
• April 4 – Frida Uhl, Austrian writer (died 1943)
• May 21 (May 9 O.S.) – Teffi, born Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya, Russian-born humorist (died 1952)
• May 31 – W. Heath Robinson, English cartoonist and illustrator (died 1944)
• June 27 – Paul Laurence Dunbar, African American poet, novelist and playwright (died 1906)
• August 24 – Max Beerbohm, English essayist and parodist (died 1956)
• October 20 – F. M. Mayor, English novelist (died 1932)
• December 28 – Pío Baroja, Spanish novelist (died 1956)

Deaths

Franz Grillparzer's tomb

• January 21 – Franz Grillparzer, Austrian poet and dramatist (born 1791)
• March 4 – Carsten Hauch, Danish poet (born 1790)
• March 10 – Giuseppe Mazzini, Italian philosopher, journalist and politician (born 1805)
• March 11 – Emily Taylor, English author, poet and hymn writer (born 1795)
• April 1 – Frederick Denison Maurice, English theologian (born 1805)
• April 13 – Samuel Bamford, English writer, poet and radical (born 1788)
• April 20 – Ljudevit Gaj, Croatian linguist and journalist (born 1809)
• May 13 – Moritz Hartmann, German poet (born 1821)
• June 1 – Charles Lever, Irish novelist (born 1806)
• August 8 – Heinrich Abeken, German theologian (born 1809)
• September 22 – Vladimir Dal, Russian lexicographer (born 1801)
• October 21 – Jean-Henri Merle d'Aubigné, Swiss historian (born 1794)
• November 16 – William Gilham, American military writer (born 1818)
• December 23 – Théophile Gautier, French poet and novelist (born 1811)

In literature

• Anthony Trollope's novel The Way We Live Now (1875) is set during this year.