1725 in literature

Events

• June 12 – Émilie de Breteuil marries Marquis Florent-Claude du Chastellet.
• December – The library of Charles Killigrew, who was the Master of the Revels for 48 years, is sold a few months after his death.
• In China, 66 copies of a 5,020-volume encyclopedia, the Gujin Tushu Jicheng are printed, which requires the crafting of 250,000 movable-type characters cast in bronze.

  New books

Prose

• Joseph Addison – Miscellanies
• The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage
• Mary Davys – The Works of Mrs. Davys
• Daniel Defoe – The Complete English Tradesman
• George Bubb Dodington – An Epistle to Sir Robert Walpole
• John Dyer – A New Miscellany
• Laurence Echard – The History of the Revelation
• Benjamin Franklin – A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain
• Johann Joseph Fux – Gradus ad Parnassum
• Zachary Grey – A Defence of Our Antient and Modern Historians
• Eliza Haywood
• *Bath-Intrigues
• *Fantomina
• *Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia
• *Secret Histories, Novels and Poems
• Francis Hutcheson – An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue
• John Oldmixon – A Review of Dr. Zachary Grey's Defence
• Richardson Pack – A New Collection of Miscellanies
• Christopher Pitt – Vida's Art of Poetry
• Richard Savage – The Authors of the Town
• William Shakespeare – The Works of Shakespear
• Jonathan Swift – Fraud Detected; or, The Hibernian Patriot
• Giambattista Vico – New Science
• Isaac Watts – Logick
• George Whitehead – The Christian Progress of George Whitehead
• Edward Young – The Universal Passion: Satire
• Benito Jerónimo Feijoo – Aprobación apologetica del scepticismo médico del doctor Martín Martínez
• Diego de Torres Villarroel – Correo del otro mundo al gran Piscator de Salamanca

  Drama

• Colley Cibber – Caesar in Aegypt
• Augustin Nadal – Mariamne
• Thomas Sheridan – The Philoctetes of Sophocles

  Poetry

• Henry Baker – Original Poems
• Henry Carey – Namby Pamby
• Thomas Cooke – The Battle of the Poets
• John Glanvill – Poems
• Alexander Pope – The Odyssey of Homer vols. i–iii
• Allan Ramsay – The Gentle Shepherd

  Births

• February 5 – Anna Maria Rückerschöld, Swedish author
• February 12 – William Mason, English poet and gardener
• March 22 – Ignacy Nagurczewski, Polish writer and translator
• April 2 – Giacomo Casanova, Italian autobiographer and adventurer
• July 24 – John Newton, English hymnist, naval officer and cleric
• December 5 – Susanna Duncombe, English poet and artist

  Deaths

• January 6 – Chikamatsu Monzaemon, Japanese dramatist
• January 26 – Sulkhan-Saba Orbeliani, Georgian prince and writer
• February 8 – John Bellers, English writer and Quaker
• March 2 – Johan Peringskiöld, Swedish antiquary and translator
• April 25 – Paul de Rapin, French historian
• June 29 – Arai Hakuseki, Japanese scholar-bureaucrat and writer
• September 5 – Christian Wernicke, German epigrammist
• December 7 – Florent Carton Dancourt, French dramatist and actor
• Unknown date – Richard Fiddes, English historian and cleric