He wrote more than ten novels, among which the most notable are: Zlatarovo zlato ('The Goldsmith's Treasure'; 1871), Čuvaj se senjske ruke [hr] ('Pirates of Senj', lit.

[6][9] When German was reinstated as the scholastic language under the so-called "Absolutism of Bach", August returned home at his father's behest to finish his gymnastic education in Gornji grad.

[9] While at school, a friend loaned him a copy Ivan Gundulić's Osman, an epic poem on the conflict with the Ottomans, which he found difficult to understand at first, having to translate it into German and then back into Croatian.

[6][9] Enamored, he began constantly seeking out books in the language, which led him to meet and become friends with Ljudevit Gaj,[9][6][10] who allowed him access to his library, just off of St. Mark's Square.

The following year, he graduated gymnasium and traveled with a friend through Slovenia and Italy, which inspired him to write A Carnation on the Grave of a Poet (Croatian: Karanfil s pjsenikova groba), one of his earliest Pan-Slavist works.

[6][9] His educational success earned him the financial support of Bishop Josip Juraj Strossmayer,[7] who helped pay for Šenoa's law school with a yearly stipend of 300 forints.

[9][11] In 1865, Šenoa graduated from the Law Faculty of Prague, but, due to a preoccupation with writing and a loss of interest in the legal profession, failed to pass his qualifying exam.

[6][9] Despite this, Šenoa moved to Vienna again, at the invitation Abel Lukšić [de], becoming the editor of the magazines Glasonoša ('The Herald') and Slawische Blätter ('Slavic Pages').

[6][9] The following year, he returned to Zagreb to become a part of the editorial staff for Pozor and contributing articles criticizing the contemporary theater scene, denigrating its lack of Croatian language and poor quality.

[9] When the editors of Pozor moved to Vienna, Šenoa stayed in Zagreb, having fallen in love with his future wife, Slava Ištvanić, the daughter of a Velika Gorica notary and judge.

[9] In January 1873, became a city senator and was put in charge of four branches: guilds, rural zadruge, social welfare and almshouses, and municipal policing; annually, he and his department handled over 2,500 cases on a salary of 130 forints per month.

Despite a complicating case of pneumonia,[6][9] he continued to write his last work, The Curse (Croatian: Kletva), until he could no longer do so, then dictating to his wife and son Milan.

Tatiana Kuzmic, a professor of the South Slavic languages at Harvard University, notes the following about this characterization: The adulterous woman of Šenoa's novel [The Goldsmith's Gold], however, fits the mold very well.

[...] As a semicolony inhabiting what was perceived by the West as the border between civilization and barbarism, between Christianity and Islam, and eager to prove that it belonged to the former, nineteenth-century Croatia, as Šenoa shows, was particularly vulnerable to the charms of "the deceiving beauty" that was Austria.

[10] Šenoa wrote his novels as distant historical fiction, as critiquing the current political situation could have proved dangerous and opened himself to censorship; both The Goldsmith's Treasure and The Peasant Revolt take place in the 16th century.

His work is known for Cecildemillean[clarification needed] scenes and poetic description of oppressed Croatian peasantry and nobility struggling against foreign rule (Venetians, Austrians/Germans and Hungarians) and romanticized period from the 15th to the 18th century.