Novelist, born in Clonmel, Co Tipperary, SC Ireland. He studied at Cambridge, was ordained in 1738, and appointed to a living in Yorkshire. In 1759 he wrote the first two volumes of his eccentric and influential comic novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, which was very well received in London, the remaining volumes appearing between 1761 and 1767. From 1762 he lived mainly abroad for health reasons, publishing A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy in 1768. His Letters from Yorick to Eliza (17759) contained his correspondence with a young married woman to whom he was devoted.
Laurence Sterne (November 24, 1713 – March 18, 1768) was an English novelist and an Anglican clergyman. Sterne died in London after years of fighting tuberculosis.
Biography
Laurence Sterne was born November 24, 1713 in Clonmel, County Tipperary, Ireland. During this period Sterne never lived in one place for more than a year. Sterne was sent to Hipperholme Grammar School near Halifax when he was ten years old; Sterne was admitted to a sizarship at Jesus College, Cambridge, in July 1733 at the age of 20. Sterne graduated with a degree of Bachelor of Arts in January 1737;
Sterne seems to have been destined to become a clergyman, and was ordained as a deacon in March of 1737 and as a priest in August, 1738. Shortly thereafter Sterne was awarded the living at Sutton-on-the-Forest in Yorkshire. Sterne married Elizabeth Lumley in 1741. Sterne’s life at this time was closely tied with his uncle, Dr. Jacques Sterne, the Archdeacon of Cleveland and Precentor of York Minster. Sterne’s uncle was also an ardent Whig, and urged Sterne to begin a career of political journalism which resulted in some scandal for Sterne and, eventually, a terminal falling-out between the two men.
Sterne lived in Sutton for twenty years, during which time he kept up an intimacy which had begun at Cambridge with John Hall-Stevenson, a witty and accomplished bon vivant, owner of Skelton Hall in the Cleveland district of Yorkshire. Without Stevenson, Sterne may have been a more decorous parish priest, but might never have written Tristram Shandy.
It was while living in the country-side, having failed in his attempts to supplement his income as a farmer and struggling with tuberculosis, that Sterne began work on his most famous novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, the first volumes of which were published in 1759. Sterne was at work on his celebrated comic novel during the year that his mother died, his wife was seriously ill, and he was ill himself with TB. The publication of Tristram Shandy made Sterne famous in London and on the continent. Indeed, Baron Fauconberg rewarded Sterne by appointing him as the perpetual curate of Coxwold, North Yorkshire.
Sterne continued to struggle with his illness, and departed England for France in 1762 in an effort to find a climate that would alleviate his suffering. Sterne was lucky to attach himself to a diplomatic party bound for Turin, as England and France were still adversaries in the Seven Years' War. Sterne was gratified by his reception in France where reports of the genius of Tristram Shandy had made him a celebrity. The novel was written during a period in which Sterne was increasingly ill and weak. Less than a month after Sentimental Journey was published, early in 1768, Laurence Sterne's strength failed him, and he died in his lodgings at 41 Old Bond Street on the 18th of March, at the age of 54.
In a curiously "Shandean" twist in events, it appears that Sterne's body was stolen shortly after it was interred and sold to the anatomists. When the churchyard of St. George's was redeveloped in the 1960s, his skull was disinterred (in a manner befitting somebody who chose for himself the nickname of "Yorick"), partly identified by the fact that it was the only skull of the five in Sterne's grave that bore evidence of having been anatomised, and transferred to Coxwold Churchyard in 1969. The story of the reinterment of Sterne's skull in Coxwold is alluded to in Malcolm Bradbury's novel To The Hermitage.
Works
Sterne's early writing life was unremarkable. Sterne did not begin work on Tristram Shandy until he was 46 years old.
Sterne is best known for his novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, for which he became famous not only in England, but throughout Europe. Translations of the work began to appear in all the major European languages almost upon its publication, and Sterne influenced European writers as diverse as Diderot and the German Romanticists. Indeed, the novel, in which Sterne manipulates narrative time and voice, parodies accepted narrative form, and includes a healthy dose of "bawdy" humor, was largely dismissed in England as being too corrupt. This is strikingly different from the views of European critics of the day, who praised Sterne and Tristram Shandy as innovative and superior. Voltaire called it "clearly superior to Rabelais", and later Goethe praised Sterne as "the most beautiful spirit that ever lived." Both during his life and for a long time after, efforts were made by many to reclaim Sterne as an arch-sentimentalist; It proceeds by fits and starts, but mostly by what Sterne calls "progressive digressions" so that we do not reach Tristram's birth before the third volume. Sterne inserts sermons, essays and legal documents into the pages of his novel; Many of the innovations that Sterne introduced, adaptations in form that should be understood as an exploration of what constitutes the novel, were highly influential to Modernist writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, and more contemporary writers such as Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace. The Russian Formalist writer Viktor Shklovsky regarded Tristram Shandy as the archetypal, quintessential novel, of which all other novels are mere subsets: "Tristram Shandy is the most typical novel of world literature." This approach is the one to which the pre-eminent scholar in the field of Sterne criticism, Melvyn New, subscribes.
Two volumes of Sterne's Sermons were published during his lifetime, and, despite the fact that more copies of his Sermons were sold in his lifetime than copies of Tristram Shandy, and the fact that for a while he was better known in some circles as a preacher than as a novelist, they are conventional in both style and substance. Several volumes of letters were published after his death, as was Journal to Eliza, a more sentimental than humorous love letter to a woman Sterne was courting during the final years of his life. Compared to many eighteenth century authors Sterne's body of work is quite small.
Sterne, who used his wife very ill, was one day talking to David Garrick in a fine sentimental manner, in praise of conjugal love and fidelity. "The husband," said Sterne, "who behaves unkindly to his wife, deserves to have his house burnt over his head." The Florida Edition of Sterne's works is currently the leading scholarly edition - although the final volume (Sterne's letters) has yet to be published. second edition, London, 1896) Paul Stapfer, Laurence Sterne, sa personne et ses ouvrages (second edition, Paris, 1882) H. Thayer, Laurence Sterne in Germany (New York, 1905) P. Benjamin, Life and Letters (two volumes, 1912) Arthur Cash, Laurence Sterne: The Early and Middle Years (ISBN 0-416-82210-X, 1975) and Laurence Sterne: The Later Years (ISBN 0-416-32930-6, 1986) Rousseau, George S.
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