1859 in literature

See also: 1858 in literature, other events of 1859, 1860 in literature, list of years in literature.

Events

• The book, Adam Bede by George Eliot, was accused of being the "vile outpourings of a lewd woman's mind" in Britain and was consequently withdrawn from libraries.

New books

• Adam Bede – George Eliot
• Les Amants – Hector Malot
• Dora Deane – Mary Jane Holmes
• The Idylls of the King – Alfred Lord Tennyson
• The Last Athenian – Viktor Rydverg
• Oblomov – Ivan Goncharov
• On the Origin of Species – Charles Darwin
• The Ordeal of Richard Feverel – George Meredith
• Rocambole – Pierre Ponson
• The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (poetry) – Edward Fitzgerald
• A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
• The World of Ice – RM Ballantyne

Births

• June 8 – Mary Cholmondeley, English writer (d. 1925)
• March 8 – Kenneth Grahame (+ 1932)
• May 22 – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (+ 1930)
• October 18 – Henri Bergson, French philosopher and winner of the 1927 Nobel Prize in literature
• December 15 – L. L. Zamenhof, Russo-Polish initiator of Esperanto

Deaths

• November 28 – Washington Irving, author
• December 28 – Thomas Macaulay, poet, historian and politician

Awards