1892 - Literature

Literature

Nonfiction: The Spirit of Modern Philosophy by Josiah Royce; Contributions to Modern Psychology (Beiträge zur experimentellen Psychologie) by University of Freiburg pschologist-philosopher Hugo Münsterberg, now 29. His German colleagues criticize the work, but he receives an invitation from William James to come to Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a visiting professor at Harvard.

Fiction: "The Yellow Wall-Paper" by Boston feminist writer Charlotte Anna Stetson (née Perkins), 32, appears in the January issue of The New England Newspaper (a niece of the late Harriet Beecher Stowe, Stetson was treated for neurasthenia shortly after her marriage in 1885, her depression became intolerable after the birth of her child, a specialist in nervous disorders forbade her to write or engage in any intellectual pursuit, but she divorced her husband, resumed her writing career, and has written a story about the helpless frustration of a female patient, a would-be writer whose madness has been brought on by the patronizing attitude of her doctor-husband and who secretly keeps a diary in the attic where she is confined); The Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People by London-born novelist and playwright Israel Zangwill, 28, whose Russian Jewish parents came to England as refugees in 1848; The Soul of Lillith by Marie Corelli; A Life (Una vita) by Trieste novelist Italo Svevo (Aron Hector [Ettore] Schmitz), 30, whose book is privately printed and receives almost no attention; The Intruder (L'Innocente) by Gabriele D'Annunzio; The American Claimant by Mark Twain; The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by A. Conan Doyle.

Short-story writer Guy de Maupassant cuts his throat in a suicide attempt January 2 while staying near his mother at Paris; physicians are called and his mother agrees reluctantly to have him confined to a local nursing home.

Poetry: Barrack-Room Ballads by Rudyard Kipling includes "Gunga Din," "If," and "The Road to Mandalay"; London Voluntaries by William Ernest Henley includes "The Song of the Sword," "England, My England," and his 1891 poem "Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae" with the line "I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion." Now 43, Henley has gathered about him a group of young writers, including Kipling, whose imperialist sentiments jibe with his own, and collaborates with his friend Robert Louis Stevenson on three plays; Fate and Other Poems (Fatalità) by Italian poet Ada Negri, 22, who since age 18 has been teaching school in the small Pavian village of Motta-Visconti. Her poems about the virtues of the hard-working, long-suffering proletariat as compared with the parasitic bourgeoisie make her an instant celebrity, and the government makes her professor of Italian literature at the normal school (teachers' college) in Milan.

Poet Walt Whitman dies at Camden, New Jersey, March 26 at age 72; John Greenleaf Whittier at Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, September 7 at age 84; Alfred Lord Tennyson at his summer home near Haslemere, Surrey, October 6 at age 81.

Juvenile: Bashful Fifteen by L. T. Meade; Men of Iron, a Romance of Chivalry by Howard Pyle; Five Little Peppers Grown Up by Margaret Sidney (Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop).