List of years in literature       (table)
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The year 1879 in literature involved some significant new books.

Events

• The Rabelais Club is founded in London, holding a literary dinner once every two months. High-profile members included novelists Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Bret Harte, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Walter Besant, and George du Maurier.

New books

• William Harrison Ainsworth - Beau Nash
• Louisa May Alcott - Jack and Jill: A Village Story
• Ethel Lynn Beers - "All Quiet Along The Potomac" and Other Poems
• Mary Elizabeth Braddon
  • The Cloven Foot
  • Vixen
• Wilkie Collins
  • The Fallen Leaves
  • A Rogue's Life
• Alphonse Daudet - Kings in Exile
• Joris-Karl Huysmans - Les Soeurs Vatard
• Henry James - Daisy Miller
• Pierre Loti - Aziyadé
• George Meredith - The Egoist
• John Boyle O'Reilly - Moondyne
• Samuel Vedanayakam Pillai - Prathapa Mudaliar Charithram
• August Strindberg
  • The Red Room
  • Roda Rummet
• Anthony Trollope
  • Cousin Henry
  • The Duke's Children
  • John Caldigate
• Jules Verne
  • The Begum's Fortune
  • Tribulations of a Chinaman in China

New drama

• James Herne - Hearts of Oak
• Henrik Ibsen - A Doll's House
• George Robert Sims - Crutch and Toothpick

Non-fiction

• Lewis Carroll - Euclid and his Modern Rivals
• Gottlob Frege - Begriffsschrift
• Robert Louis Stevenson - Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes

Births

• January 1 - E. M. Forster (d. 1970)
• April 14 - James Branch Cabell, (d. 1958)
• October 2 - Wallace Stevens, poet (d. 1955)
• December 24 - Émile Nelligan, poet (d. 1941)

Deaths

• February 11 - Willem J van Zeggelen, Dutch author
• March 3 - Annie Keary, novelist
• March 9 - Mark Prager Lindo, historian
• March 19 - Claire Clairmont, lover of Lord Byron
• April 8 - Anthony Panizzi, librarian
• April 21 - George Hadfield, Radical author and politician
• April 25 - Charles Tennyson Turner, poet
• July 4 - Sarah Dorsey, novelist and historian
• July 30 - Aasmund Olavsson Vinje, poet and journalist
• September 23 - Francis Kilvert, diarist
• October 13 - Henry Charles Carey, economist
• October 28 - Marie Roch Louis Reybaud, political economist
• October 31
  • Jacob Abbott, writer
  • John Baldwin Buckstone, dramatist

Awards