1815 in literature

First issue of the North American Review with signature of its editor William Tudor.

• January 2 – Lord Byron marries Anna Isabella Milbanke at Seaham, County Durham.
• April 7 – Lord Byron and Walter Scott first meet, in the London offices of the publisher John Murray, 50 Albemarle Street.[1]
• May – The North American Review is first published.
• June 15 – The Duchess of Richmond's ball is held in Brussels on the night before the Battle of Quatre Bras and three nights before the Battle of Waterloo, by Charlotte, Duchess of Richmond for her son, the writer Lord William Lennox. It features later in works by Lord Byron, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Lever, Georgette Heyer, Bernard Cornwell and Julian Fellowes.[2][3]
• December 23
  • Jane Austen's novel Emma is published anonymously by John Murray in London.[4] dated 1816 Some 1500 copies sell over the next five years.
  • The Polish scholar and adventurer Count Jan Potocki believes he is turning into a werewolf and shoots himself with a silver bullet, leaving his novel The Manuscript Found in Saragossa incomplete.[5]
• Thomas Love Peacock's first novel Headlong Hall is published anonymously by Thomas Hookham in London, dated 1816.[6]
• First complete publication of the Old English epic poem Beowulf appears in a Latin translation by Icelandic-Danish scholar Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin.
• The second volume of the first edition of the Brothers Grimm's Grimms' Fairy Tales is dated this year but published late in 1814.
• The United States Library of Congress, destroyed in the 1814 Burning of Washington, is reinstated by purchasing the personal library of a former President, Thomas Jefferson.

• February 19 – Elizabeth Missing Sewell, English novelist and educationist (died 1906)
• April 24 – Anthony Trollope, English novelist (died 1882)
• April 25 – Richard William Church, English biographer and cleric (died 1890)
• May 5 – Eugène Marin Labiche, French dramatist (died 1888)
• July 17 – Thekla Knös, Swedish poet (died 1880)
• August 1 – Marițica Bibescu, Wallachian poet and literary patron (died 1859)
• October 4 – Franz Jakob Clemens, German philosopher (died 1862)
• November 5 – Martins Pena, Brazilian dramatist (died 1848)
• November 17 – Eliza Farnham, American novelist and reformer (died 1864)
• December 10 – Augusta Ada King (née Byron), Countess of Lovelace, English mathematician and writer on computing (died 1852)
• December 20 – James Legge, Scottish sinologist, missionary and translator (died 1897)

Uncertain date

• Meenakshi Sundaram Pillai, Tamil scholar and poet (died 1876)

• January 21 – Matthias Claudius (Asmus), German poet (born 1740)
• January 30 – Hans Christian Amberg, Danish lexicographer (born 1749)
• November 2 – Gottlieb Christoph Harless, German bibliographer (born 1738)
• November 11 – Pierre-Louis Ginguené, French writer and critic (born 1748)
• November 17 – Dorothea Viehmann, German fairy-story teller (born 1755)
• December 20 – Giovanni Meli, Sicilian poet (born 1740)
• December 23 – Jan Potocki, Polish polymath (born 1761)

• The following works are set around the time of the Battle of Waterloo
  • Lord Byron's poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto III (1816)
  • Robert Southey's poem The Poet's Pilgrimage to Waterloo (1816)
  • Charlotte Caroline Richardson's Waterloo, a Poem on the Late Victory (1817)
  • William Hamilton Maxwell's Stories from Waterloo (1834)
  • Stendhal's novel The Charterhouse of Parma (La Chartreuse de Parme, 1839)
  • William Makepeace Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair (1847–48)
  • Victor Hugo's poem "L'Expiation" (in Les Châtiments, 1853); his novel Les Misérables (1862) opens at this time
  • Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Great Shadow (1892) and some of his adventures of Brigadier Gerard (1902)
  • Thomas Hardy's epic verse drama The Dynasts (1904–08)
  • Georgette Heyer's novel An Infamous Army (1937)
  • Bernard Cornwell's novel Sharpe's Waterloo (1990)
  • Winston Graham's novel The Twisted Sword (1990)