1885 in literature

Events

• January 1 – The Dictionary of National Biography begins publication in London under the editorship of Leslie Stephen.
• February 7 – José Echegaray's play La vida alegre y muerte triste opens.
• February 18 – Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is published in the United States for the first time, in New York by the author's own publishing house, Charles L. Webster, illustrated by E. W. Kemble, the first impression having been delayed for replacement of an unauthorized obscene alteration to one of the illustrative plates. Its first-person narrative in colloquial language is initially controversial but ultimately influential in the development of realism in American literature.
• March 19 – Bolesław Prus's first major naturalistic novel, The Outpost, begins serialization in the Polish illustrated weekly, :pl:Wędrowiec |Wędrowiec.
• May 16 – Sakuradoki Zeni no Yononaka, an adaptation by Genzo Katsu after Bunkai Udagawa of The Merchant of Venice set in the Edo period, is performed by the Nakamura Sojuro Kabuki company at the Ebisu-za Theater in Osaka, the first of Shakespeare's plays to be staged with actors in Japan.
• May 19 – The Revised Version Old Testament is published.
• June 1 – More than two million people join Victor Hugo's funeral procession in Paris from the Arc de Triomphe to the Panthéon, where he is the first author to be buried, following his death on May 22 in the city from pneumonia aged 83.
• June 29 – Thomas Hardy moves to a house he designed for himself and built by his brother at Max Gate on the outskirts of Dorchester, Dorset.

• Henri Beauclair and Gabriel Vicaire, using the pseudonym Adoré Floupette, publish Les Déliquescences d'Adoré Floupette, a parodic collection of poems satirising French symbolism and the Decadent movement.
• Arthur Napier is appointed first Merton Professor of English Language and Literature in the University of Oxford.
• John Ormsby's English translation of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote is published. For many years it is regarded as the most accurate translation of the novel.
• The first translation of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace into English begins publication. It has been done by Clara Bell from a French version.
• The first translation of Amy Catherine Walton 's Christian novel Christie's Old Organ into Japanese, made by Tajima Kashi, is published, one of the earliest examples of children's literature in Japan.
• Daniel Owen's long novel Hunangofiant Rhys Lewis, Gweinidog Bethel is published as the first written in Welsh.

  New books

Fiction

• Leopoldo Alas – La regenta, vol. 2
• Richard Francis Burton – The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night: A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments
• Hall Caine
• *She's All the World to Me
• *The Shadow of a Crime
• Mrs. W. K. Clifford – Mrs. Keith's Crime
• Antonio Fogazzaro – Daniele Cortis
• William Dean Howells – The Rise of Silas Lapham
• Richard Jefferies – After London
• Jerome K. Jerome – On the Stage — and Off
• Eliza Lynn Linton – The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland
• Guy de Maupassant – Bel-Ami
• George Meredith – Diana of the Crossways
• Friedrich Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra
• Daniel Owen – Hunangofiant Rhys Lewis, Gweinidog Bethel
• Walter Pater – Marius the Epicurean
• Tsubouchi Shōyō – Tōsei Shosei Katagi
• Elizabeth Stannard – Booties' Baby: a story of the Scarlet Lancers
• Jules Vallés – Jacques Vingtras
• Jules Verne – Mathias Sandorf
• Émile Zola – Germinal

  Children and young people

• Lewis Carroll – A Tangled Tale
• H. Rider Haggard – King Solomon's Mines
• Robert Louis Stevenson
• *A Child's Garden of Verses
• *Prince Otto
• Mark Twain – Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

  Drama

• Arthur Wing Pinero – The Magistrate

  Poetry

• See 1885 in poetry

  Non-fiction

• J. W. Cross – George Eliot's Life, as related in her letters and journals
• Anténor Firmin – De l'Égalité des Races Humaines
• Tsubouchi Shōyō – Shōsetsu Shinzui

  Births

• January 16 – Zhou Zuoren, Chinese vernacular writer
• February 7 – Sinclair Lewis, American novelist
• February 21 – Sacha Guitry, French dramatist and screenwriter
• February 24 – Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Polish painter, playwright and novelist
• March 6 – Ring Lardner, American writer
• March 25 – Mateiu Caragiale, Romanian novelist and poet
• March 27 – Constantin Gane, Romanian biographer and historical novelist
• May 2 – Hedda Hopper, American columnist
• May 9 – Al. T. Stamatiad, Romanian poet
• September 7 – Elinor Wylie, American poet and novelist
• September 11 – D. H. Lawrence, English fiction writer and poet
• October 3 – Sophie Treadwell, American dramatist and journalist
• October 11 – François Mauriac, French novelist
• October 30 – Ezra Pound, American poet
• November 9 – Velimir Khlebnikov, Russian Futurist poet and writer
• December 8 – Kenneth Roberts, American novelist

  Deaths

• January 10 – Amable Tastu, French women of letters and poet
• February 14 – Jules Vallés, French writer
• March 17 – Susan Warner, American religious and children's writer
• April 8 – Susanna Moodie, English-born Canadian author
• April 18 – Marc Monnier, French author and translator
• April 30 – Jens Peter Jacobsen, Danish novelist
• May 13 – Juliana Horatia Ewing, English children's writer
• May 15 – Hugh Conway, English novelist
• May 22 – Victor Hugo, French poet and novelist
• June 18 – Louis Segond, Swiss theologian
• July 13 – Augusto Vera, Italian philosopher
• July 15 – Rosalía de Castro, Spanish Galician poet and writer
• August 11 – Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron Houghton, English man of letters, poet and politician
• September 18 – John Campbell Shairp, Scottish critic
• November 29 – Anne Gilchrist, English-born American critic and biographer