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The year 1696 in literature involved some significant events.

Events

• Vincenzo da Filicaja becomes governor of Volterra.
• The Kit-Kat Club is founded in London.
• Theatre Royal, Drury Lane stages The Female Wits, an anti-feminist satire targeting Mary Pix, Mary Delarivière Manley, and Catherine Trotter, three significant women dramatists of the era. The play is a hit, and runs for three nights straight (unusual in the repertory system of the day).

New books

• John Aubrey - Miscellanies
• Philip Ayres - The Revengeful Mistress
• Aphra Behn - The Histories and Novels of the Late Ingenious Mrs. Behn (posthumous)
• Charles Leslie - The Snake in the Grass
• Mary Pix - The Inhumane Cardinal; or, Innocence Betray'd (novel)
• John Suckling - The Works of Sir John Suckling
• John Tillotson - The Works of John Tillotson

New drama

• Anonymous - Bonduca, or The British Heroine (adapted from Fletcher's Bonduca)
• Anonymous - The Cornish Comedy
• Anonymous ("W. M.") - The Female Wits, or the Triumverate of Poets at Rehearsal
• John Banks - Cyrus the Great, or The Tragedy of Love
• Aphra Behn - The Younger Brother, or The Amorous Jilt
• Colley Cibber - Love's Last Shift, or Virtue Rewarded
• Thomas Doggett - The Country Wake
• Thomas D'Urfey - The Comical History of Don Quixote. The Third Part
• George Granville, 1st Baron Lansdowne - The She-Gallants
• Joseph Harris - The City Bride; or, The Merry Cuckold (adapted from A Cure for a Cuckold)
• Charles Hopkins - Neglected Virtue; or, The Unhappy Conquerour
• Mary Delarivière Manley
  • The Lost Lover, or The Jealous Husband
  • The Royal Mischief
• Peter Anthony Motteux
  • Love's a Jest
  • She Ventures and He Wins
• Mary Pix - The Spanish Wives
  • Ibrahim, the Thirteenth Emperour of the Turks
• Edward Ravenscroft - The Anatomist, or the Sham Doctor
• Thomas Southerne - Oroonoko (adapted from Aphra Behn's novel Oroonoko)
• John Vanbrugh - The Relapse, or, Virtue in Danger (a sequel to Colley Cibber's Love's Last Shift)

Poetry

• Nicholas Brady & Nahum Tate - A New Version of the Psalms of David
• John Dryden - An Ode on the Death of Mr Henry Purcell (died 1695)
• John Oldmixon - Poems on Several Occasions
• Elizabeth Rowe - Poems on Several Occasions
• Nahum Tate - Miscellanea Sacra; or, Poems on Divine & Moral Subjects

Non-fiction

• Richard Baxter - Reliquiae Baxterianae (posthumous)
• Gerard Croese - The General History of the Quakers (translation
• An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex (anonymous)
• Mary Delarivière Manley - Letters Written by Mrs. Manley
• William Penn - Primitive Christianity Revived in the Faith and Practice of the People called Quakers
• John Sheffield, 1st Duke of Buckingham and Normanby - The Character of Charles II, King of England
• John Toland - Christianity Not Mysterious
• William Whiston - A New Theory of the Earth

Births

• July 14 - William Oldys, antiquarian and bibliographer (died 1761)
• October 13 - John Hervey, 2nd Baron Hervey, memoirist (died 1743)
• date unknown - Matthew Green, poet (died 1737)
• Henry Home, Lord Kame

Deaths

• May 10 - Jean de La Bruyère, French essayist (born 1645)
• John Bancroft