George Eliot publishes Middlemarch, in which Dorothea makes a disastrous marriage to the pedantic Edward Casaubon

The Gilded Age, by Charles Dudley Warner and Mark Twain, provides the familiar name for life in the US towards the end of the nineteenth century

English author Thomas Hardy has his first success with his novel Far from the Madding Crowd

Leo Tolstoy publishes the first volume of his novel Anna Karenina, in which the heroine develops a fatal love for Count Vronsky

Henry James's early novel Roderick Hudson is serialized in the Atlantic Monthly and is published in book form in 1876

Mark Twain publishes The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, in which Tom and his friends find excitement in a small town on the Mississippi

US author Joel Chandler Harris introduces Uncle Remus in a story in the Constitution

Henry James's story Daisy Miller, about an American girl abroad, brings him a new readership

Gustave Flaubert dies, with his novel Bouvard et Pécuchet incomplete

Dostoevsky publishes his novel The Brothers Karamazov, featuring the four sons of the depraved Feodor Pavlovich Karamazov

US author Lew Wallace publishes a historical novel, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

In Washington Square Henry James tells the sad story of heiress Catherine Sloper

Joel Chandler Harris publishes Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, the first of many Uncle Remus volumes

Henry James's novel The Portrait of a Lady studies an American girl, Isabel Archer, in the unfamiliar context of Europe

Robert Louis Stevenson's adventure story, Treasure Island, features Long John Silver and Ben Gunn

Huck Finn and his friend Tom Sawyer continue their exploits on the Mississippi in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

In his novel The Rise of Silas Lapham US author William Dean Howells follows the fortunes of a self-made man in Boston

US author Frances Hodgson Burnett publishes Little Lord Fauntleroy, featuring an aristocratic child in a velvet suit

Robert Louis Stevenson introduces a dual personality in his novel The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Thomas Hardy publishes his novel The Mayor of Casterbridge, which begins with the future mayor, Michael Henchard selling his wife and child at a fair

Sherlock Holmes features in Conan Doyle's first novel, A Study in Scarlet

9-year-old Daisy Ashford imagines an adult romance and high society in The Young Visiters

Herman Melville dies in obscurity in New York, with an unpublished manuscript of Billy Budd (not printed till 1924)

Oscar Wilde publishes his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray in which the ever-youthful hero's portrait grows old and ugly

Thomas Hardy publishes his novel Tess of the Durbervilles, with a dramatic finale at Stonehenge