1839 in literature

Events

• January 21 – Åbo Svenska Teater in Åbo, Finland, opens with a performance of the Swedish-language play Gubben i Bergsbygden.
• May 31 – An important British constitutional case of Stockdale v Hansard begins when publisher John Joseph Stockdale sues for libel after John Roberton's pseudo-medical work On Diseases of the Generative System is declared in a parliamentary report to be indecent.
• September – The first known London production of Love's Labour's Lost after Shakespeare's era opens at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, with Madame Vestris as Rosaline.

• Washington Irving begins contributing regularly to The Knickerbocker, and will publish thirty new pieces in the magazine through March 1841 — including "The Creole Village," where he coins the phrase "the almighty dollar".
• Mikhail Lermontov publishes the first two parts of A Hero of Our Time in Otechestvennye Zapiski. The novel comes to be seen as a pioneering classic of Russian psychological realism.
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a late 14th-century Middle English alliterative romance by the 'Pearl Poet', is first published complete in Syr Gawayne, a collection of early romance poems by Scottish and English authors relating to that knight of the Round Table, edited by Frederic Madden for the Bannatyne Club.
• George Bell establishes the London publisher George Bell & Sons as an educational bookseller in Bouverie Street.
• W. Harrison Ainsworth takes over editorship of Bentley's Miscellany from Charles Dickens at the end of the year. Until April serializations of their respective novels Jack Sheppard and Oliver Twist have been running simultaneously in the magazine.

  New books

Fiction

• W. Harrison Ainsworth – Jack Sheppard
• Carl Jonas Love Almqvist – Det går an
• Honoré de Balzac
• *Béatrix
• *Illusions perdues, II: Un Grand homme de province à Paris
• *Pierre Grassou
• Nicolaas Beets – Camera Obscura
• Fredrika Bremer – Hemmet eller familje-sorger och fröjder
• Sarah Burney – The Romance of Private Life: The Renunciation and The Hermitage
• Charles Dickens – Nicholas Nickleby
• Alexandre Dumas - Captain Pamphile
• Maurits Hansen – Mordet paa Maskinbygger Roolfsen
• Frederick Marryat – Diary in America
• Harriet Martineau – Deerbrook
• Ellen Pickering
• *Nan Darrell, or The Gypsy Mother
• *The Fright
• Edgar Allan Poe
• *The Fall of the House of Usher
• *William Wilson
• George Sand
• *Pauline
• *Spiridion
• Jules Sandeau – Marianna
• Stendhal – The Charterhouse of Parma
• Philip Meadows Taylor – Confessions of a Thug
• Cirilo Villaverde – Cecilia Valdés

  Children and young people

• Catherine Sinclair – Holiday House. A Book for the Young
• Frederick Marryat – The Phantom Ship

  Drama

• Edward Bulwer – Richelieu
• Felicia Hemans – De Chatillon
• George Sand – Gabriel
• Juliusz Słowacki – Balladyna

  Poetry

• Philip James Bailey – Festus
• Cláudio Manuel da Costa – Vila Rica
• Théodore Hersart de la Villemarqué – Barzaz Breiz
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – Voices of the Night

  Non-fiction

• Louis Blanc – L'Organisation du travail
• Charles Darwin – The Voyage of the Beagle
• Mrs William Ellis – The Women of England: their social duties and domestic habits
• Michael Faraday – Experimental Researches in Electricity
• George W. M. Reynolds – Grace Darling; or, the Heroine of the Ferne Islands
• Jared Sparks – Life of Washington
• John Tallis – Tallis Directory

  Births

• January 7 – Ouida, English novelist
• January 26 – Mary Ann Maitland, Scottish-born Canadian author
• February 1 – James Herne, American dramatist
• February 22 – Francis Pharcellus Church, American editor and publisher
• March 16 – Sully Prudhomme, French poet and essayist, winner of the first Nobel Prize in Literature
• April 18 – Henry Kendall, Australian poet
• June 21 – Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Brazilian poet and novelist
• June 22 – Clara Augusta Jones Trask, American dime novelist
• July 5 – Helen Stuart Campbell, American author, editor, and reformer
• July 11 – Kate Sanborn, American author and essayist
• August 4 – Walter Pater, English writer
• August 9 – Gaston Paris, French writer and scholar
• August 25 – Martha E. Cram Bates, American writer, journalist, and editor
• September 10 – Charles Sanders Peirce, American philosopher
• November 4 – S. M. I. Henry, American author, evangelist, and reformer
• November 16 – William De Morgan , English novelist and potter
• November 29 – Ludwig Anzengruber, Austrian dramatist
• December 12 – Charlotte Frances Wilder, American writer
• December 23 – Lucinda Barbour Helm, American author, editor, and activist

  Deaths

• January 16 – Edmund Lodge, English biographer and writer on heraldry
• April 11 – John Galt, Scottish novelist and entrepreneur
• April 13 – Robert Millhouse, English weaver poet
• April 22 – Thomas Haynes Bayly, English poet, songwriter and dramatist
• May 9 – Joseph Fiévée, French journalist, novelist, essayist and playwright
• May 17 – Archibald Alison, Scottish author
• May 21 – José María Heredia y Campuzano, Cuban poet
• June 26 – Winifred Gales, English novelist and memoirist
• August 3 – Dorothea von Schlegel, German novelist and translator
• September 4 – Hermann Olshausen, German theologian
• September 28 – William Dunlap, American dramatist
• October 11 – Leonor de Almeida Portugal, 4th Marquise of Alorna, Portuguese noblewoman, painter, and poet
• October 22 – Alexander Odoevsky, Russian poet

• Elizabeth Dawbarn, English writer on religion and child care
• Mary Pilkington, English novelist, poet and children's writer

  Awards

• Newdigate prize – John Ruskin

  In literature

• Amitav Ghosh's novel Flood of Fire is set during the First Opium War.
• Hugh Lofting's children's novel The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle is set in this year.
• Judith Rossner's novel Emmeline is based on events of this year.
• Jules Verne's An Antarctic Mystery follows on from Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.