1892 in literature

Events

• January – The Schauspielhaus Zürich opens as the Volkstheater am Pfauen, a music hall.
• January 18 – Rudyard Kipling marries Caroline Starr Balestier.
• February 22 – Oscar Wilde's comedy Lady Windermere's Fan is premièred at St James's Theatre in London, starring Winifred Emery and Marion Terry.
• April 27 – The magazine Isis is established by students at the University of Oxford.
• June – Rehearsals for the première of Oscar Wilde's play Salome for inclusion in Sarah Bernhardt's London season are halted when the British Lord Chamberlain's licensor of plays prohibits it for including Biblical characters.
• July 15 – The Bibliographical Society is established in London.
• September 12 – The 11-year-old Virginia Stephen, the later novelist Virginia Woolf, takes a boat trip to Godrevy Lighthouse on a family holiday in Cornwall.
• October 14 – The first collection of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories from The Strand Magazine, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, is published by George Newnes in London; it includes Doyle's favourite, "The Adventure of the Speckled Band", which was originally published in February.
• October 20 – Constantin Dobrescu-Argeș inaugurates Romania's first rural printing press, at Mușătești.
• November – The Sewanee Review is established by William Peterfield Trent; it will become the oldest continuously published literary quarterly in the United States.
• December 9 – George Bernard Shaw's first play Widowers' Houses has its first performance, at the Royalty Theatre in London under the auspices of the Independent Theatre Society. The author is booed.
• December 21 – Brandon Thomas' farce Charley's Aunt begins a record-breaking London run at the Royalty Theatre.
• The Irish Literary Society is founded by W. B. Yeats, T. W. Rolleston and Charles Gavan Duffy in London, and the National Literary Society by Yeats in Dublin with scholar Douglas Hyde as its first president.
• unknown dates
• *Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio is translated into English for the first time, by Mary Alice Murray.
• *Shadows Uplifted by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper becomes the second novel by an African-American woman published in the United States.

  New books

Fiction

• C. R. Ashbee – From Whitechapel to Camelot
• Mary Elizabeth Braddon – The Venetians
• Rhoda Broughton – Mrs. Bligh
• Gabriele D'Annunzio – :it:L'innocente |L'innocente
• Arthur Conan Doyle – The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
• Theodor Fontane – Frau Jenny Treibel
• Ludwig Ganghofer - The Monastery's Hunter
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman – The Yellow Wallpaper
• George Gissing – Born in Exile
• George and Weedon Grossmith – The Diary of a Nobody
• Thomas Hardy – The Well-Beloved
• Frances Ellen Watkins Harper – Shadows Uplifted
• Herman Heijermans – Trinette
• Emily Lawless – Grania: The Story of an Island
• J. McCullough – Golf in the Year 2000
• William Hurrell Mallock – A Human Document
• Helen Mathers, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker and 21 others – The Fate of Fenella
• Karl May – Durch Wüste und Harem
• Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne – The Wrecker
• Mark Twain – The American Claimant
• Jules Verne – Mistress Branican
• Mary Augusta Ward – The History of David Grieve
• Israel Zangwill
• *The Big Bow Mystery
• *Children of the Ghetto
• Émile Zola – La Débâcle

  Children and young people

• H. Irving Hancock – His One Ambition; or, The Boy Reporter

  Drama

• R.C. Carton – Liberty Hall
• José Echegaray – Mariana
• Georges Feydeau – Champignol malgré lui
• Jacob Mikhailovich Gordin
• *Der Pogrom in Rusland
• *Tsvey veltn, oder Der groyser sotsialist
• *Der yidisher kenig lir
• Gerhart Hauptmann – The Weavers
• Mykhailo Starytsky – Oi Ne Khody, Hrytsiu
• Brandon Thomas – Charley's Aunt
• Oscar Wilde – Lady Windermere's Fan

  Poetry

• Rudyard Kipling – Barrack-Room Ballads
• W. B. Yeats – The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics

  Non-fiction

• Peter Kropotkin – The Conquest of Bread
• Papus – La Kabbale
• Ferdinand Praeger – Wagner As I Knew Him
• Rudolph Sohm – Kirchenrecht
• Joseph Wright – A Grammar of the Dialect of Windhill in the West Riding of Yorkshire
• Ella Hepworth Dixon – My Flirtations

  Births

• January 3 – J. R. R. Tolkien, South African-born English novelist and scholar
• February 8 – Ralph Chubb, English poet, printer and artist
• February 22 – Edna St. Vincent Millay, American poet
• February 23 – Agnes Smedley, American journalist and writer
• March 1 – Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Japanese short story writer and poet
• March 8 – Juana de Ibarbourou, Uruguayan poet
• March 9
• *David Garnett, English novelist
• *Vita Sackville-West, English poet, novelist and gardener
• March 18 – Robert P. T. Coffin, American poet, essayist, novelist and academic
• March 22 – Karel Poláček, Czech writer, humorist and journalist
• May 26 – Maxwell Bodenheim, American poet and novelist
• May 29 – Max Brand, born Frederick Schiller Faust, American Western, pulp fiction and screenwriter
• June 12 – Djuna Barnes, American writer
• June 26 – Pearl S. Buck, born Pearl Sydenstricker, American novelist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature
• July 1 – James M. Cain, American author and journalist
• July 12 – Bruno Schulz, Polish writer and artist
• August 5 – Margery Fish, English gardening writer
• October 8 – Marina Tsvetaeva, Russian poet
• October 9 – Ivo Andrić, Serbo-Croatian novelist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature
• October 27 – Victor E. van Vriesland, Dutch writer
• December 10 – Lucy M. Boston, born Lucy Maria Wood, English children's novelist
• December 21
• *Amy Clarke, English mystical poet, author and academic
• *Rebecca West, born Cicily Fairfield, English writer
• unknown dates
• *Gheorghe A. Lăzăreanu-Lăzurică, Romanian Romani writer and activist
• *Sheila Stuart, Scottish author and children's writer

  Deaths

• January 20 – Christopher Pearse Cranch, American poet and magazine editor
• January 28 – Gustav Zerffi, Hungarian journalist and rationalist
• March 16 – Edward Augustus Freeman, English historian and politician
• March 26 – Walt Whitman, American poet
• April 15 – Amelia Edwards, English fiction writer and Egyptologist
• July 10 – Rudolf Westphal, German classical scholar
• July 15 – Thomas Cooper, English Chartist poet
• July 18 – Rose Terry Cooke, American poet and novelist
• August 25 – Richard Lewis Nettleship, English philosopher
• September 7 – John Greenleaf Whittier, American Quaker poet
• September 17 – Ignaz Vincenz Zingerle, Austrian poet
• September 23 – George Grub, Scottish church historian
• October 2 – Teréz Karacs, Hungarian novelist, poet and memoirist
• October 12 – Xavier Marmier, French writer and translator
• October 17 – David Edelstadt, Russian-born American poet in Yiddish
• October 21 – Anne Charlotte Leffler, Swedish novelist and dramatist
• October 24 – Anton Gindely, Bohemian historian
• December 3 – Afanasy Fet, Russian lyric poet, essayist and short-story writer
• December 27 – Orange Judd, American editor and publisher