This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1872.

Events

• March
  • The Federation of Madrid expels Paul Lafargue and all other signatories to an ostensibly subversive article in La Emancipación.^[1]
  • Serialisation 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.^[2]
• June 15 – Thomas Hardy's second novel (and the first set in Wessex), Under the Greenwood Tree, is published in London (as "by the author of Desperate Remedies").
• 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 (Reichsland Elsass-Lothringen) after destruction of its predecessors in the Siege of Strasbourg in the Franco-Prussian War.^[3]
• July – Rose la Touche rejects a proposal from John Ruskin for the last time.^[4]
• July 7 – Paul Verlaine abandons his family for London with Arthur Rimbaud.^[5]
• September 13 (O. S.: September 1) – Romanian poet Mihai Eminescu first attends the literary club Junimea of Iași and reads out his fantasy story Poor Dionis (Sărmanul Dionis). It is poorly received by the Junimists.^[6]
• September 30 – George MacDonald arrives in Boston for a lecture tour of the United States.^[7]
• November (approximate date) – Lafcadio Hearn becomes a reporter on the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer.^[8]
• December 3 – Assyriologist 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 (Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours) finishes serialisation (since November 2) in the daily Le Temps, the day after the concluding date of the narrative.
• unknown dates
  • 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.^[9]
  • The Scottish Gaelic magazine Féillire first appears as Almanac Gàilig air son 1872 in Inverness.^[10]

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 (Бесы, Bésy)
• Alexandre Dumas, père – Création et rédemption
• George Eliot – Middlemarch (serial publication concluded)
• Mihai Eminescu – Poor Dionis (Sărmanul Dionis)
• Thomas Hardy – Under the Greenwood Tree
• Mór Jókai
  • Eppur si muove – És mégis mozog a Föld (And yet the Earth moves)
  • The Man with the Golden Touch (Az arany ember)
• Sheridan Le Fanu
  • In a Glass Darkly
  • Willing to Die
• Nikolai Leskov – The Cathedral Folk (Соборяне, Soboryane)
• 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 (Aventures de trois Russes et de trois Anglais dans l'Afrique australe)
  • The Fur Country (Le Pays des fourrures)
• 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
• E. J. Richmond – The Jewelled Serpent
• Susan Coolidge – What Katy Did (first in the What Katy Did series of five books)^[11]
• Ouida – A Dog of Flanders

Drama

• François Coppée – Les Bijoux de la Délivrance^[12]
• Franz Grillparzer – The Jewess of Toledo (Die Jüdin von Toledo, first performed posthumously, written 1851)
• Prosper Mérimée – La Chambre bleue (published posthumously)
• August Strindberg – Master Olof
• Ivan Turgenev – A Month in the Country («Месяц в деревне», Mesiats v derevne, first performed)^[13]

Poetry

• José Hernández – Martín Fierro (first part)^[14]

Non-fiction

• Chambers's English Dictionary
• William Cullen Bryant – Picturesque America, vol. 1^[15]
• 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 (Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik)
• Alexandru Papadopol-Calimah – Scrieri vechi perdute atingetóre de Dacia (Old Lost Writings Relating to Dacia; first installments)
• 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 (died 1939)
• March 31 – Mary Lewis Langworthy, American pageant writer (died 1949)
• April 4
  • Alexandru Tzigara-Samurcaș – Romanian art historian, ethnographer and journalist (died 1952)
  • Frida Uhl – Austrian writer (died 1943)
• May 2 – Ichiyō Higuchi, Japanese writer (died 1896)^[16]
• May 21 (May 9 O.S.) – Teffi, born Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya, Russian-born humorist (died 1952)
• May 31 – W. Heath Robinson, English cartoonist and illustrator (died 1944)
• June 27 – Paul Laurence Dunbar, African American poet, novelist and playwright (died 1906)
• August 24 – Max Beerbohm, English essayist and parodist (died 1956)
• September 15 – Frances Garnet Wolseley, English horticulturist and garden writer (died 1936)
• September 22 – Eleanor Hallowell Abbott, American fiction writer and poet (died 1958)
• October 8 – John Cowper Powys, Anglo-Welsh novelist (died 1963)
• October 10 – Arthur Talmage Abernethy, American theologian and poet (died 1956)
• October 18 (October 6 O.S.) – Mikhail Kuzmin, Russian poet, novelist and composer (died 1936)
• October 20 – F. M. Mayor, English novelist (died 1932)
• November 23 – Eraclie Sterian, Romanian science writer and playwright (died 1948)
• December 28 – Pío Baroja, Spanish novelist (died 1956)^[17]

Deaths

• January 21 – Franz Grillparzer, Austrian poet and dramatist (born 1791)
• February 6 – Sir Thomas Phillipps, English book collector (born 1792)
• March 4 – Carsten Hauch, Danish poet (born 1790)
• March 10 – Giuseppe Mazzini, Italian philosopher, journalist and politician (born 1805)
• March 11 – Emily Taylor, English author, poet and hymn writer (born 1795)
• April 1 – Frederick Denison Maurice, English theologian (born 1805)
• April 13 – Samuel Bamford, English essayist and poet (born 1788)
• April 20 – Ljudevit Gaj, Croatian linguist and journalist (born 1809)
• May 13 – Moritz Hartmann, German poet (born 1821)
• May 29 – Frank Key Howard, American journalist and memoirist (born 1826)^[18]
• June 1 – Charles Lever, Irish novelist (born 1806)
• July 25 – Gregorio Gutiérrez González, Colombian poet (born 1826)
• August 8 – Heinrich Abeken, German theologian (born 1809)
• September 11 – Countess Dash, French writer (born 1804)
• September 18 – Herbert Haines, English historian and Anglican theologian (born 1826)
• September 22 – Vladimir Dal, Russian lexicographer (born 1801)
• October 10 – Fanny Fern, American journalist, novelist and children's writer (born 1811)
• October 21 – Jean-Henri Merle d'Aubigné, Swiss historian (born 1794)
• November 16 – William Gilham, American military writer (born 1818)
• December 23 – Théophile Gautier, French poet and novelist (born 1811)^[19]