1705 in literature

• April/May – Richard Steele, having left the army, marries a wealthy widow, Margaret Stretch.^[1]
• July 29 – Richard Challoner enters the English College, Douai.
• October 7 – William Somervile inherits his father's estate, where field sports will inspire much of his poetry.^[2]
• October 30 – John Vanbrugh's play The Confederacy, adapted from the French, is first performed at his new London playhouse, The Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket.^[3][4]
• December 27 – John Vanbrugh's play The Mistake is likewise adapted from the French and first performed at The Queen's Theatre.^[3][4]
• unknown dates
  • George Hickes' Linguarum veterum septentrionalium thesaurus grammatico-criticus et archæologicus vol. 2 (published in Oxford) includes the first published reference to Beowulf and the single surviving transcript of the Finnesburg Fragment.
  • Chikamatsu Monzaemon (近松門左衛門) almost abandons writing kabuki plays and becomes a staff writer to the bunraku theatre in Osaka.^[5]
  • Claude Pierre Goujet, religious historian and Jansenist, enters holy orders.
  • William Walsh begins a correspondence with Alexander Pope.
  • Work begins on Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, England, designed by the playwright John Vanbrugh for the Duke of Marlborough.^[6]

• Joseph Addison – Remarks on Several Parts of Italy
• Mary Astell – The Christian Religion as Profess'd by a Daughter of the Church
• Dimitrie Cantemir – Historia Hieroglyphica (the first novel to use the Romanian language)
• George Cheyne – Philosophical Principles of Natural Religion (deist)
• Samuel Clarke – A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God
• Mary Davys – The Fugitive
• Daniel Defoe
  • The Consolidator; or, Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from the World in the Moon
  • A Second Volume of the Writings of the Author of the True-Born Englishman
• John Dunton – The Life and Errors of John Dunton Late Citizen of London (humor)
• Edmund Gibson – Family-Devotion
• Charles Gildon – The Deist's Manual
• Marie-Jeanne L'Héritier – La Tour ténébreuse, et les jours lumineux: contes anglois
• Bernard de Mandeville – The Grumbling Hive (pirated edition)
• Delarivière Manley – The Secret History, of Queen Zarah, and the Zarazians (roman à clef)
• John Philips
  • Blenheim
  • The Splendid Shilling
• Katherine Philips – Letters of Orinda to Poliarchus
• John Toland – Primitive Constitution of the Christian Church

• Thomas Baker – Hampstead Heath
• Susannah Centlivre
  • The Gamester (anonymously)
  • The Basset-Table
• Colley Cibber – The Careless Husband
• Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon – Idoménée
• John Dennis – Gibraltar, or the Spanish Adventure
• George Granville – The British Enchanters
• William Grimston, 1st Viscount Grimston – The Lawyer’s Fortune or Love in a Hollow Tree
• Peter Anthony Motteux
  • The Amorous Miser, or the Younger the Wiser
  • Arsinoe, Queen of Cyprus (opera)
• William Mountfort – Zelmane
• Mary Pix (attributed) – The Conquest of Spain (adapted from William Rowley's All's Lost by Lust)
• Nicholas Rowe – Ulysses
• Richard Steele – The Tender Husband
• John Vanbrugh –
  • The Confederacy
  • The Mistake

• Richard Blackmore – Eliza
• Daniel Defoe
  • The Double Welcome
  • The Dyet of Poland
• Complete Tang Poems
• Charles Johnson – The Queen; a Pindaric Ode
• Matthew Prior – An English Padlock
• Ned Ward – Hudibras Redidivus
• Isaac Watts – Horae Lyricae

See also 1705 in poetry

• January 21 – Isaac Hawkins Browne, English poet (died 1760)
• February 13 – Franciszka Urszula Radziwillowa, Polish dramatist^[7] (died 1753)
• May – Ambrosius Stub, Danish poet (died 1758)
• June 21 – David Hartley, English philosopher (died 1757)
• September 2 – Abraham Tucker (Edward Search), English philosopher (died 1774)
• October 29 – Gerhardt Friedrich Müller, German historian (died 1783)
• November 23 – Thomas Birch, English historian (died 1766)
• probable – Stephen Duck, English poet (died 1756)

• January 4 – Madame d'Aulnoy, French author of fairy tales (born c. 1650)^[8]
• January 10 – Étienne Pavillon, French lawyer and poet (born 1632)
• February 5 – Philipp Jakob Spener, German theologian (born 1635)
• April 2 – John Howe, English theologian (born 1630)
• May 5 – Johann Ernst Glück, German writer and translator (born 1654)
• June 10 – Michael Wigglesworth, English poet (born 1631)
• October 17 – Ninon de l'Enclos, French courtesan and salonnière (born 1620)
• November 10 – Justine Siegemund, German writer on midwifery (born 1636)^[9]