1797 in literature

Events

• Walter Scott marries Charlotte Carpenter.
• Jane Austen finishes a draft of Pride and Prejudice.

New books

• Hannah Webster Foster - The Coquette, or the History of Eliza Wharton (published anonymously)
• Friedrich Hölderlin - Hyperion, volume 1
• Jan Potocki - The Manuscript Found in Saragossa
• Ann Radcliffe - The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents
• Marquis de Sade - l'Histoire de Juliette
• Royall Tyler - The Algerine Captive

New drama

• Richard Cumberland
  • False Impressions
  • The Last of the Family
• Thomas John Dibdin - Sadak and Kalasrade
• Elizabeth Inchbald - Wives as They Were, and Maids as They Are

New poetry

Non-fiction

• François-René de Chateaubriand -Essai sur les révolutions
• The Columbian Orator
• Johann Gottlieb Fichte - Foundations of Natural Right
• Lorenzo Mascheroni - Geometria del Compasso
• Thomas Paine - Agrarian Justice

Births

• March 13 - Charles de Rémusat, politician and writer (died 1875)
• March 27 - Alfred de Vigny, poet
• August 30 - Mary Shelley, novelist
• September 28 - Sophie von Knorring, novelist (died 1848)
• December 13 - Heinrich Heine, poet (died 1856)

Deaths

• May 27 - François-Noël Babeuf, journalist and political agitator
• July 9 - Edmund Burke, philosopher
• September 10 - Mary Wollstonecraft, philosopher
• October 4 - Johann Christian Georg Bodenschatz, Protestant theologian
• December - Mathurin-Léonard Duphot, poet (guillotined)
• date unknown - William Mason, poet and editor

Awards