STERNE, LAURENCE. - Novelist, born at Clonmel (Ireland) of an English father and an Irish mother on 24 Nov. 1713, died in London on 18 March 1768.
He was an Anglican clergyman, good-naturedly sceptical and of not irreproachable morals. Yet it may also be observed that the scepticism of English writers of the eighteenth century was not animated by a Voltairean spirit (not even in a Chesterfield), that their Enlightenment was tempered by a fondness for a lukewarm Christianity little concerned with the notion of sin (a kind of sui generis “via media”), and that, as the English critic H. J. C. Grierson has noted, their master is the most Christian of writers, Cervantes. Sterne freed himself from every demand for plot, and his work as a narrator is characterized and dominated by playful and learned digression and by an ironic and sentimental analysis—both of himself and of his characters. It is indeed in Lamb, the delightful humorist and essayist, that one may point to the most worthy continuer of his manner in the nineteenth century, while only in our own century has this manner been adapted to the scale of the novel.
Sterne’s major works are *The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy* (1760–67), regarded as his masterpiece, and *A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy* (1768, placed on the Index by decree of 6 Sept. 1819), in which the title of a novel first highlighted an effect that was to enjoy great favour with the Romantics. Of some interest are his *Sermons of Mr. Yorick*, in which Sterne first adopted the pseudonym that appears at the head of the *Journey*, and above all his sentimental correspondence: *Letters from Yorick to Eliza*, published posthumously in 1775.