1797 in literature

Events

• June 5 – Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, living at Nether Stowey in the Quantock Hills, Somerset, renews his friendship with William Wordsworth and Wordsworth's sister, Dorothy, who take a house nearby.
• July 15 – George Colman's comedy The Heir at Law opens in London. It introduces the character of Dr. Pangloss to the stage and the phrase "Queen Anne's dead" to the language.
• August – The British Home Office sends an agent to Nether Stowey to investigate Coleridge and Wordsworth who are suspected of being French spies.
• October – Coleridge composes the poem Kubla Khan in an opium-induced dream, writing down only a fragment of it on waking.
• November 1 – Jane Austen's father writes to London bookseller Thomas Cadell to ask if he is interested in seeing the manuscript of Jane's recently completed novel First Impressions ; Cadell declines.
• November – Wordsworth suggests to Coleridge the theme of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner on a walk in the Quantocks.
• December 24 – Walter Scott marries Charlotte Carpenter at St Mary's Church, Carlisle. The couple immediately move to a new home at 50 George Street, Edinburgh.
• Hatchards bookshop is founded in London's Piccadilly by John Hatchard; it continues to trade on the same site into the 21st century.

  New books

Fiction

• "Mrs Carver" – The Horrors of Oakendale Abbey
• Hannah Webster Foster – The Coquette, or the History of Eliza Wharton
• Friedrich Hölderlin – Hyperion, volume 1
• Frances Margaretta Jacson – Disobedience
• Jan Potocki – The Manuscript Found in Saragossa
• Ann Radcliffe – The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents
• Marquis de Sade – L'Histoire de Juliette
• Royall Tyler – The Algerine Captive

  Children

• Charlotte Palmer – A Newly-Invented Copybook

  Drama

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Osorio
• George Colman – The Heir at Law
• Richard Cumberland
• *False Impressions
• *The Last of the Family
• Thomas John Dibdin – Sadak and Kalasrade
• Elizabeth Inchbald – Wives as They Were, and Maids as They Are
• Matthew Lewis – The Minister: A Tragedy, in five acts

  Poetry

Non-fiction

• Thomas Bewick – History of British Birds vol. 1
• François-René de Chateaubriand – Essai sur les révolutions
• The Columbian Orator
• Johann Gottlieb Fichte – Foundations of Natural Right
• Lorenzo Mascheroni – Geometria del Compasso
• Thomas Paine – Agrarian Justice
• Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling – Die Weltseele

  Births

• March 13 – Charles de Rémusat, French politician and writer
• March 27 – Alfred de Vigny, French poet
• July 12 – Adele Schopenhauer, German novelist and paper-cut artist
• August 30 – Mary Shelley, English novelist
• September 16 – Anthony Panizzi, Italian-born English scholar and librarian
• September 28 – Sophie von Knorring, Swedish novelist
• December 13 – Heinrich Heine, German poet
• Unknown date – Charlotte Barton, Australian children's author
• Approximate date – Thomas Cautley Newby, English publisher

  Deaths

• March 2 – Horatio Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford – English man of letters
• April 7 – William Mason, English poet and editor
• May 27 – François-Noël Babeuf, French journalist and political agitator
• July 9 – Edmund Burke, Irish-born philosopher
• September 10 – Mary Wollstonecraft, English philosopher
• October 4 – Johann Christian Georg Bodenschatz, German Protestant theologian
• December – Mathurin-Léonard Duphot, French poet
• Unknown date – Yuan Mei, Chinese poet, diarist and gastronome