1815 in literature

Events

• January 2 – Lord Byron marries Anna Isabella Milbanke at Seaham, County Durham.
• April 7 – Lord Byron and Walter Scott meet for the first time, in the offices of publisher John Murray, 50 Albemarle Street in London.
• May – First publication of the North American Review.
• June 15 – The Duchess of Richmond's ball is held in Brussels on the night before the Battle of Quatre Bras by Charlotte, Duchess of Richmond for her son, the writer Lord William Lennox. It subsequently features in literary works by Lord Byron, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Lever, Georgette Heyer, Bernard Cornwell and Julian Fellowes.
• December 23
• *Jane Austen's novel Emma is published anonymously by John Murray in London dated 1816. About 1500 copies sell over the next 5 years.
• *Polish scholar and adventurer Count Jan Potocki, believing that he is becoming a werewolf, shoots himself with a silver bullet, leaving his novel The Manuscript Found in Saragossa incomplete.
• Thomas Love Peacock's first novel Headlong Hall is published anonymously by Thomas Hookham in London, dated 1816.
• First complete publication of the Old English epic poem Beowulf, in a Latin translation by Icelandic-Danish scholar Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin.
• The second volume of the first edition of the Brothers Grimm's Grimms' Fairy Tales is dated this year but published late in 1814.

  New books

Fiction

• Jane Austen – Emma
• Sarah Green – The Fugitive
• Elizabeth Gunning
• *The Man of Fashion: a Tale of Modern Times
• *The Victims of Seduction
• Ann Hatton – Secret Avengers
• Mary Hays – The Brothers, or Consequences
• E. T. A. Hoffmann – The Devil's Elixirs
• Barbara Hofland – A Father as He Should Be
• Christian Isobel Johnstone – Clan-Albin: A National Tale
• Elizabeth Meeke – Spanish Campaigns, or The Jew
• Thomas Love Peacock – Headlong Hall
• Mary Pilkington
• *Celebrity
• *The Unfortunate Choice
• Jane Porter – The Pastor's Fireside
• Regina Marie Roche – Edinburg; a Novel
• Walter Scott – Guy Mannering
• Catharina Smith – Barozzi or the Venetian Sorceress: A Romance of the Sixteenth Century
• Elizabeth Thomas – The Baron of Falconberg, or Childe Harolde in prose

  Drama

• Barbarina Brand – Ina, a tragedy in five acts
• Bernhard Severin Ingemann – Blanca
• James Sheridan Knowles – Caius Gracchus
• Jane Scott – The Gipsy Girl
• Eugène Scribe and Delestre Poirson – Une Nuit de la Garde nationale

  Poetry

• Pierre-Jean de Béranger – Chansons I
• Lord Byron – Hebrew Melodies
• Walter Scott – The Field of Waterloo
• Percy Bysshe Shelley – Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude
• William Wordsworth – The White Doe of Rylstone

  Non-fiction

• Simón Bolívar – Letter to Jamaica
• George Cavendish – The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey
• Alexander von Humboldt – Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent during the Years 1799–1804
• Les Jeux des Jeunes Garçons
• John Malcolm – The History of Persia, from the Most Early Period to the Present Time
• Thomas Malthus – An Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent

  Births

• February 19 – Elizabeth Missing Sewell, English novelist and educationist
• April 24 – Anthony Trollope, English novelist
• April 25 – Richard William Church, English biographer and cleric
• May 5 – Eugène Marin Labiche, French dramatist
• July 17 – Thekla Knös, Swedish poet
• August 1 – Marițica Bibescu, Wallachian poet and literary patron
• October 4 – Franz Jakob Clemens, German philosopher
• November 5 – Martins Pena, Brazilian dramatist
• November 17 – Eliza Farnham, American novelist and reformer
• December 10 – Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, English mathematician and writer on computing
• December 20 – James Legge, Scottish sinologist, missionary and translator

• Meenakshi Sundaram Pillai, Tamil scholar and poet

  Deaths

• January 21 – Matthias Claudius, German poet
• January 30 – Hans Christian Amberg, Danish lexicographer
• November 2 – Gottlieb Christoph Harless, German bibliographer
• November 11 – Pierre-Louis Ginguené, French writer and critic
• November 17 – Dorothea Viehmann, German fairy-story teller
• December 20 – Giovanni Meli, Sicilian poet
• December 23 – Jan Potocki, Polish polymath

  In literature

• The following works are set around the time of the Battle of Waterloo
• *Lord Byron's poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto III
• *Robert Southey's poem The Poet's Pilgrimage to Waterloo
• *Charlotte Caroline Richardson's Waterloo, a Poem on the Late Victory
• *William Hamilton Maxwell's Stories from Waterloo
• *Stendhal's novel The Charterhouse of Parma
• *William Makepeace Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair
• *Victor Hugo's poem "L'Expiation" ; his novel Les Misérables opens at this time
• *Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Great Shadow and some of his adventures of Brigadier Gerard
• *Thomas Hardy's epic verse drama The Dynasts
• *Georgette Heyer's novel An Infamous Army
• *Bernard Cornwell's novel Sharpe's Waterloo
• *Winston Graham's novel The Twisted Sword