Laurence Sterne: the Early and Middle Years

First published in 1975, Laurence Sterne is biography of Sterne's life which emphasizes those experiences which informed Sterne's fiction. The book is based on an exhaustive search for original documents, and a study of the social, political, and ecclesiastical institutions which shaped Sterne's world. We see the novelist as a soldier's child, student, struggling young cleric, Yorkshire famer, and judge of the spiritual courts, and we trace his literary development from political hack to humourist. The story begins – like Tristram's – with the subject's conception and ends with the publication of Volumes I and II of Tristram Shandy. This book will be of interest to students of literature, literary history as well as to any casual reader of Sterne's novels.