1872 in literature

Events

• March
• *The Federation of Madrid expels Paul Lafargue and all other signatories to an ostensibly subversive article in La Emancipación.
• *Serialization of Sheridan Le Fanu's Gothic vampire novella Carmilla ends in the monthly The Dark Blue. Later this year it appears in his collection In a Glass Darkly. Set in the Duchy of Styria, it helps to introduce the lesbian vampire genre.
• June 19 – The Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire is founded in Strasbourg as the Kaiserliche Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek zu Straßburg, a public regional and academic library for the new German territory of Alsace-Lorraine after destruction of its predecessors in the Siege of Strasbourg in the Franco-Prussian War.
• July– Rose la Touche rejects a proposal from John Ruskin for the last time.
• July 7 – Paul Verlaine abandons his family for London with Arthur Rimbaud.
• September 13 – Romanian poet Mihai Eminescu first attends the literary club Junimea of Iași and reads out his fantasy story Poor Dionis . It is poorly received by the Junimists.
• September 30 – George MacDonald arrives in Boston for a lecture tour of the United States.
• November – Lafcadio Hearn becomes a reporter on the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer.
• 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 finishes serialization in the daily Le Temps, the day after the concluding date of the narrative.

• Benito Pérez Galdós begins Trafalgar, the first in the series of historical novels known as Episodios Nacionales.
• The first university course in American Literature is held at Princeton University by John Seely Hart.
• The Scottish Gaelic magazine Féillire first appears as Almanac Gàilig air son 1872 in Inverness.

  New books

Fiction

• Machado de Assis – Ressurreição
• 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
• Annie Hall Cudlip – A Passion in Tatters
• Alphonse Daudet – Tartarin de Tarascon
• Fyodor Dostoevsky – Demons
• Alexandre Dumas, père – Création et rédemption
• George Eliot – Middlemarch
• Mihai Eminescu – Poor Dionis
• Thomas Hardy – Under the Greenwood Tree
• Mór Jókai
• *Eppur si muove – És mégis mozog a Föld
• *The Man with the Golden Touch
• Sheridan Le Fanu
• *In a Glass Darkly
• *Willing to Die
• Nikolai Leskov – The Cathedral Clergy
• 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
• *The Fur Country
• Émile Zola – La Curée

  Children and young adults

• R. D. Blackmore – The Maid of Sker
• Frances Freeling Broderip – Tiny Tadpoles, and Other Tales
• Juliana Horatia Ewing – A Flat Iron for a Farthing
• George MacDonald – The Princess and the Goblin
• Susan Coolidge – What Katy Did

  Drama

• Franz Grillparzer – The Jewess of Toledo
• Prosper Mérimée – La Chambre bleue
• August Strindberg – Master Olof
• Ivan Turgenev – A Month in the Country

  Poetry

• José Hernández – Martín Fierro

  Non-fiction

• Chambers's English Dictionary
• William Cullen Bryant – Picturesque America, vol. 1
• John Evans – The Ancient Stone Implements, Weapons and Ornaments of Great Britain
• Warren Felt Evans – Mental Medicine
• Sophia Jex-Blake – Medical Women: A Thesis and a History
• Friedrich Nietzsche – The Birth of Tragedy
• 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
• April 4 – Frida Uhl, Austrian writer
• May 21 – Teffi, born Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya, Russian-born humorist
• May 31 – W. Heath Robinson, English cartoonist and illustrator
• June 27 – Paul Laurence Dunbar, African American poet, novelist and playwright
• August 24 – Max Beerbohm, English essayist and parodist
• September 15 – Frances Garnet Wolseley, English horticulturist and garden writer
• September 22 – Eleanor Hallowell Abbott, American fiction writer and poet
• October 10 – Arthur Talmage Abernethy, American theologian and poet
• October 18 – Mikhail Kuzmin, Russian poet, novelist and composer
• October 20 – F. M. Mayor, English novelist
• December 28 – Pío Baroja, Spanish novelist

  Deaths

• January 21 – Franz Grillparzer, Austrian poet and dramatist
• February 6 – Sir Thomas Phillipps, English book collector
• March 4 – Carsten Hauch, Danish poet
• March 10 – Giuseppe Mazzini, Italian philosopher, journalist and politician
• March 11 – Emily Taylor, English author, poet and hymn writer
• April 1 – Frederick Denison Maurice, English theologian
• April 13 – Samuel Bamford, English essayist and poet
• April 20 – Ljudevit Gaj, Croatian linguist and journalist
• May 13 – Moritz Hartmann, German poet
• June 1 – Charles Lever, Irish novelist
• July 25 – Gregorio Gutiérrez González, Colombian poet
• August 8 – Heinrich Abeken, German theologian
• September 22 – Vladimir Dal, Russian lexicographer
• September 18 – Herbert Haines, English historian and Anglican theologian
• October 10 – Fanny Fern, American journalist, novelist and children's writer
• October 21 – Jean-Henri Merle d'Aubigné, Swiss historian
• November 16 – William Gilham, American military writer
• December 23 – Théophile Gautier, French poet and novelist
• Unknown date – Frank Key Howard, American journalist and memoirist