1803 in literature

The year 1803 in literature involved some significant events and new books.

Events

 * Novelist Mary Butt marries Captain Henry Sherwood, acquiring the surname by which she will become best known.

New books

 * Charles Brockden Brown - Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist
 * Catherine Cuthbertson - The Romance of the Pyrenees
 * Camilla Dufour - Aurora
 * Elizabeth Guénard - The Three Monks!!!
 * Elizabeth Gunning - The War-Office
 * Elisabeth Helme - St. Clair of the Isles
 * Francis Lathom – ''The Mysterious Freebooter’’
 * Alicia Lefanu - Lucy Osmond
 * Mary Meeke - A Tale of Mystery, or Celina
 * Christiane Benedicte Eugenie Naubert -Walter de Monbray
 * Jane Porter - Thaddeus of Warsaw
 * Anne Louise Germaine de Stael -Margaret of Strafford
 * Sarah Wilkinson
 * The Chateau de Montville
 * The Subterraneous Passage
 * Sophia Woodfall - Frederick Montravers
 * Mary Julia Young
 * The Kinsmen of Naples
 * Moss Cliff Abbey

New drama

 * William Dunlap - Voice of Nature (adapted from the French)
 * Collin d'Harleville - Malice pour malice
 * Heinrich von Kleist - Die Familie Schroffenstein
 * August von Kotzebue - Die deutschen Kleinstädter (comedy "The German Small-towner" )
 * Friedrich Schiller - Die Braut von Messina

Poetry

 * Henry Kirke White - Clifton Grove, a Sketch in Verse, with other Poems

Non-fiction

 * Immanuel Kant - Über Pädagogik
 * Adamantios Korais - Present Conditions of Civilisation in Greece
 * Joseph Lancaster - Improvements in Education as it Respects the Industrious Classes
 * Thomas Malthus - Principles of Population

Births

 * January 3 - Douglas William Jerrold, dramatist (d. 1857)
 * May 25 - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, novelist, poet and dramatist (d. 1873)
 * May 25 - Ralph Waldo Emerson, poet, essayist and philosopher (d. 1882)
 * September 28 - Prosper Mérimée, French author
 * November 14 - Jacob Abbott, children's writer (d. 1879)
 * December 6 - Susanna Moodie, British-Canadian writer (d. 1885)
 * December 31 - José María Heredia y Heredia, Cuban poet (d. 1839)

Deaths

 * February 11 - Jean-François de La Harpe, dramatist and critic (b. 1739)
 * March 14 - Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, poet (b. 1724)
 * June 12 - Richard François Philippe Brunck, classical scholar (b. 1729)
 * September 5 - Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, novelist (b. 1841)
 * October 8 - Vittorio Alfieri, dramatist (b. 1749)
 * December 18 - Johann Gottfried Herder, philosopher, poet and critic (b. 1744)
 * date unknown - James Woodforde, diarist (b. 1740)