Sterne, Laurence

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Sterne, Laurence (1713–68). Novelist and humorist. Son of a low-ranking infantry officer but educated through a cousin's bounty at Jesus College, Cambridge, where he embraced Locke's philosophy and contracted tuberculosis, Sterne was ordained and collated to a Yorkshire living (1738). Voracious reader, moderately successful rural parson though a persistent philanderer, his satire on local ecclesiastical courts jeopardized preferment but encouraged him to entrust the parish to a curate and concentrate on writing. Tristram Shandy (1759) prompted both applause and abuse for its sentimentality and salaciousness, though, freeing the novel from straightforward narrative, it has since been seen as begetter of ‘stream-of-consciousness’ writing. Sterne revelled in the literary esteem and social notoriety he found in London, but was forced to forsake England briefly for France for health reasons, this providing material for his Sentimental Journey (1767). His corpse was exhumed by London resurrectionists but escaped dissection for secret reburial, being finally interred at Coxwold (his last Yorkshire living) in 1969.

A. S. Hargreaves

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