1814 in literature

Events

• January 14 – The Imperial Public Library in Saint Petersburg opens to the public.
• January 26 – Actor Edmund Kean makes his London début in the leading rôle of Shylock at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.
• February 1 – Lord Byron's semi-autobiographical tale in verse The Corsair is published by John Murray in London and sells 10,000 copies on this day and over 25,000 in the first month, going through seven editions. His Lara sells 6,000 copies on publication in the summer. Walter Scott is to say of Byron's poetry: "He beat me out of the field in description of the stronger passions and in deep-seated knowledge of the human heart."
• July 7 – Walter Scott's Waverley, his first work of fiction and a major early historical novel in English, is published anonymously by Archibald Constable in Edinburgh, a week after Scott finishes it. It sells out in two days.
• July 28–September 13 – English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley abandons his pregnant wife and runs away to France and Switzerland with the 16-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, accompanied by her stepsister Jane Clairmont, also 16.
• August 24 – The British in the War of 1812 burn the original Library of Congress, at this time housed in the United States Capitol.
• September 12–15 – Battle of Baltimore : American lawyer Francis Scott Key, witnessing the bombardment of Baltimore, Maryland, from a British ship, writes "Defence of Fort McHenry". His brother-in-law arranges to have the poem published in a broadside with a recommended tune on September 17; on September 20 both the Baltimore Patriot and The American print it. The song quickly becomes popular – seventeen newspapers from Georgia to New Hampshire reprint it. In 1931, it is adopted as "The Star-Spangled Banner" as the national anthem of the United States.
• September 21 After the United States Library of Congress, destroyed in the 1814 Burning of Washington, is re-stocked by the purchasing of the personal library of ex-President Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson writes to Samuel H. Smith, saying that there is "no subject to which a Member of Congress may not have occasion to refer".
• November 29 – In London, The Times newspaper is printed using a revolutionary steam press for the first time. It runs at a rate of 1100 copies per hour.
• Late – The first edition of the second volume of the Brothers Grimm's Grimms' Fairy Tales appears, dated 1815.

• The earliest known printed Arabic language version of One Thousand and One Nights begins publication in Calcutta by the British East India Company.
• Alfred de Vigny enrolls as an officer in the Maison du Roi, the King's guard of Louis XVIII of France.

  New books

Fiction

• Jane Austen – Mansfield Park
• Fanny Burney – The Wanderer: or, Female Difficulties
• Mary Brunton – Discipline
• Adelbert von Chamisso – Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte
• Selina Davenport – The Hypocrite
• Maria Edgeworth – Patronage
• Pierce Egan – The Mistress of Royalty
• Jane Harvey
• *Auberry Stanhope
• *Ethelia: a Tale
• Ann Hatton – Conviction
• Laetitia Matilda Hawkins – Rossane; or A Father's Labour Lost
• William Henry Hitchener – The Towers of Ravenswold
• Christian Isobel Johnstone – The Saxon and the Gaël
• Mary Meeke – Conscience
• Lady Morgan – O'Donnell
• Anna Maria Porter – The Recluse of Norway
• Regina Maria Roche – Trecothick Bower
• Walter Scott – Waverley
• Louisa Stanhope – Madelina: A Tale Founded on Facts
• Takizawa Bakin – Nansō Satomi Hakkenden
• Elizabeth Thomas – The Prison-House
• Jane West – Alicia de Lacy

Children

• Maria Elizabeth Budden – Always Happy!!: Or, Anecdotes of Felix and his Sister Serena. A Tale
• Barbara Hofland – Emily and Her Friends
• Mary Martha Sherwood – The History of Little Henry and his Bearer

  Drama

• Leigh Hunt – The Descent of Liberty
• René Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt – The Dog of Montarges
• Richard Lalor Sheil – Adelaide, or the Emigrants

  Poetry

• Lord Byron
• *The Corsair
• *Lara
• Henry Cary – translation of Dante's Divine Comedy
• Adam Oehlenschlager – Helge
• William Wordsworth – The Excursion

  Non-fiction

• Elizabeth Craven – Letters from the Right Honorable Lady Craven to his Serene Highness the Margrave of Anspach during her travels through France, Germany and Russia in 1785 and 1786
• Thomas Hartwell Horne – Introduction to the Study of Bibliography
• Legh Richmond – The Dairyman's Daughter
• Percy Bysshe Shelley – A Refutation of Deism
• Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert – Die Symbolik der Traüme

  Births

• January 15 – Pierre-Jules Hetzel, French publisher and young people's writer
• January 17 – Mrs. Henry Wood, English novelist
• February 18 – Samuel Fenton Cary, American author and prohibitionist
• March 9 – Taras Shevchenko, Ukrainian poet
• June 8 – Charles Reade, English novelist and dramatist
• July 23 – George W. M. Reynolds, English popular novelist
• August 28 – Sheridan le Fanu, Irish Gothic writer
• September 17 – Ferenc Pulszky, Hungarian writer and politician
• October 3 – Mikhail Lermontov, Russian poet
• November 6 – William Wells Brown, African-American writer
• December 27 – Jules Simon, French philosopher

• Edward Backhouse Eastwick, Anglo-Indian orientalist and translator

  Deaths

• January 4 – Johann Georg Jacobi, German poet
• January 21 – Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, French novelist and travel writer
• January 27 – Johann Gottlieb Fichte, German philosopher
• February 24 – Julien Louis Geoffroy, French literary critic
• February 27 – Margaret Bingham, English poet and painter
• April 12 – Charles Burney, English music historian and musician
• July 25 – Charles Dibdin, English novelist, playwright and actor
• September 5 – Gottfried Gabriel Bredow, German historian
• October 4 – Samuel Jackson Pratt, English poet, playwright and novelist
• November 10 – Abbé Aubert, French dramatist, poet and journalist
• December 2 – Marquis de Sade, French philosopher, writer and politician

  Awards

• Newdigate Prize – John Leycester Adolphus