Sterne, Laurence

Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768), English novelist and humorist, who wrote The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, one of the great 18th-century masterpieces of English fiction.

Sterne was born on November 24, 1713, in Clonmel, County Tipperary. The son of an English army officer, he was educated at the University of Cambridge and was ordained a priest in the Church of England in 1738. He spent the next 21 years as a vicar in Yorkshire, preaching eccentric sermons, reading the 16th-century French satirist François Rabelais and old romances, and spending his time and attentions on women other than his wife.

In 1760 Sterne settled in London, where, despite suffering from tuberculosis, he lived a social, dissolute life. His Sermons of Mr Yorick (1760-1769) was well received. The first two volumes of his major work, the droll, rambling, and slyly indecorous novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767), caused a literary sensation. They are important more for revealing the thoughts and feelings of the narrator than for describing external events. Tristram Shandy was a highly original and innovative work; it exploded the budding conventions of the novel and confounded the expectations of its readers (“my work is digressive, and it is progressive too,—and at the same time”). Famously, the judgement of Samuel Johnson that “Nothing odd will do long; Tristram Shandy did not last” has proved to be wrong. Sterne’s ironic use of the ideas of John Locke about ideas, perception, and time prefigures the later stream-of-consciousness style, while his witty, self-reflexive, and knowingly ambiguous tale is now claimed as a precursor of the modern novel.

Seven more volumes appeared between 1761 and 1767. Sterne also published Journal to Eliza (1767), written to Mrs Eliza Draper, the most important love of his life apart from his wife. For health reasons, from 1762 to 1764 Sterne lived in Toulouse, France, with his wife, who was mentally ill, and their daughter. In 1765 he made a lengthy tour of France and Italy that resulted in A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768), an influential work for the growing cult of sensibility and fine feeling. His travels are the occasion for an exploration of sensibility, benevolence, and sensuality, at once infuriatingly ambiguous and tantalizingly erotic. The hero, Yorick, characteristically declares that “there is not a more perplexing affair in life to me, than to set about telling anyone who I am”. When Sterne died in London on March 18, 1768, only two volumes of this work had appeared. Volumes of his letters were posthumously published in 1775.