Last year marked 250 years since the birth of the English novelist Jane Austen. The Conversation celebrated this important literary milestone with a series of articles and a dedicated podcast, Jane Austen’s Paper Trail. This special year saw a variety of high-profile celebratory events across the country, from regency balls and film screenings, to special tours and literary talks.

But literary anniversaries are not just limited to famous and well-loved authors, however significant. Many dates pass us by unmarked, despite the fact that we are in the midst of a golden era of key dates of literary significance.

The 2020s has been a decade of major Romantic-period milestones, including the bicentenaries of the deaths of the poets John Keats (2021), Percy Bysshe Shelley (2022), and Byron (2024). Last year’s Austen anniversary was particularly notable because the writer was so widely and enthusiastically celebrated.

Yet it also was the centenary year of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s jazz-age classic The Great Gatsby, alongside Virginia Woolf’s modernist favourite Mrs Dalloway. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love all turned 80, while children’s classic The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis celebrated its 75th birthday.

In 2026 there is another slew of big anniversaries, marking the tercentenary of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and 200 years since the ever-relevant Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (her 1826 novel about the near extinction of humanity after a global plague) was first released.

A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh first indulged in........

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